Get a Better Strategic Vantage Point
You understand your strategy, but your employees don’t
As a leader of your company, you have a clear vision about the direction you want it to go. However, you may also be making the assumption your employees are on the same page.
The truth is, research shows that strategic planning is a rare exercise that isn’t widely shared or discussed with the employee base, and often ends up on pages that sit in a binder on a shelf.
In fact, 95% of your employees do not understand your strategy.
What is strategy? It is a set choices [what to do and not to do] that defines your goals, priorities and activities. Activities that create value for you and your stakeholders plus position market differentiation. Without a clear path, you risk competing based on product differentiation and the efficiency of your teams’ ability to execute. This is a very common challenge.
Perhaps a bigger downfall of not having a shared strategy is that employees will not feel engaged – and while they have a willingness to succeed, they aren’t being provided a blueprint for success. This means you’re not making the most of your staff’s talents, which is not beneficial to your company or its employees.
Ink can help develop the blueprint to your strategic infrastructure
and develop a unique strategy, one that can be simple to follow and implemented at all company levels.
Change is Hard
We hear the term “transformation” all the time when talking with clients. Companies and people may know change is required, but may not what to do [or why] or drastically under estimate the scope of what is truly required. We wrote this book to be a quick and idea filled guide of things to consider if you believe transformation is required.
Most Executives Underestimate Sales Effectiveness
The majority of senior executives identify organic revenue growth as one of their company’s top three priorities, but underestimate the critical enablers that are required to achieve their goals. They can’t reach the next level due to market and internal challenges, yet they don’t have a plan to overcome these challenges.
Over the course of the past few years, we have had the privlidge to speak with over 200 senior executives from companies large and small. We ask them all to rate to rate the effectiveness of their sales organization on a scale of 1 to 10 [10 being high]. We have never had an answer higher than a 6.
What this tells you, is that despite best efforts and intentions, there is a material gap. The understanding of the issues and opportunities that exist in this gap could be the difference between achieving your organic growth goals or not.
Executives have frustrations with the results, returns on sales investments and predictability of outcomes. Money is being spent, but often leaders are either solving the wrong problem or under investing in critical areas.
Many Sales Teams Aren’t Equipped To Succeed
Sales, and specifically complex sales, are like sports in that you measure success through wins and losses. A loss may remove the opportunity with that account for the next five to twenty years. A win creates an opportunity to cross sale and up sell to that account over the same period.
The stakes are indeed high. How well equipped for battle are your sales teams?
One of the root problems is a lack of a defined and differentiated sales process.
A Sales Process defines “how you sell” your goods and services.
A well-considered Sales Process can create market differentiation through the experience of doing business with your teams versus others in the market. It can also make it easier to buy from you at a time when the act of buying [or changing] has never been more challenging. It also creates alignment across your sales teams and the other functions that support sales.
Consider the impact of a unique Sales Process with all the supporting elements. Without it, your teams are forced to be self-sufficient and will rely on their previous knowledge and experiences to get by.
This is one reason why only 40% of Sales Reps achieve their quota.
What could happen if you do have a differentiated Sales Process that aligns your sales activities and your teams? First and maybe most importantly, the experience of doing business with your team feels different and easier. You create value through the experience itself and how you interact. Second, you can align the type of people you hire, your training, and your tools to enable your Sales Process. One last point of benefit that we see with a lot of our clients is dramatically improved execution. Whether we are measuring Win Rate, Cost of Sale, Deal Size [or many other metrics] the clarity they have through their process makes them much better executors. We believe that comes through tactical awareness.
Despite this deficiency, research shows less than 50 per cent of companies even have a sales process, and an alarmingly low 10 per cent believe they have a sales process that creates any value or differentiation in the market.