High Performance Sales | Blog

As sales consultants, we encounter sales leaders with a variety of fancy acronyms in their titles. In addition to the SVPs/EVPs of Sales, the sales leader landscape also includes CROs, CSOs, and CGOs. While these titles imply a distinction in roles, to most people, it’s just alphabet soup. 

What’s the difference between a Chief Sales Officer (CSO) and a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) or Chief Growth Officer (CGO)? From the CEO or board member perspective, which role does your business need? For a sales leader, which role is the best fit with your capabilities?

The easiest way to distinguish between these roles is to compare their scope of responsibility, core objectives, and what defines success. Appointing a “heavy hitter” to a CSO, CRO or CGO role, rather than a VP of Sales, indicates the need for a greater span of oversight from a strategic, revenue generation, and customer lifecycle perspective.

“Bold” is the best word to describe the opening of last week’s Seismic Shift, which is the annual customer conference for sales enablement provider Seismic. This year, 500 attendees gathered at San Diego’s sleek Pendry Hotel to share experiences and inspiration around sales enablement. The name of the conference itself -- “Seismic Shift” -- along with some skillful marketing, applies the notion of CHANGE to an industry (sales enablement) in the midst of crossing the proverbial chasm to mainstream adoption, and to the innovators (Seismic customers) who are using the technology to “transform their businesses.”

Seismic CEO Doug Winter shared impressive stats and trends on industry growth and Seismic’s momentum. According to SiriusDecisions, 74% of enterprises increased their sales enablement budget in 2017 and 37% of high performing organizations increased it by 30% or more. 

Winter noted that “something has changed” in their market, suggesting a move toward broad, mainstream adoption of sales enablement solutions. As sales performance consultants, we can attest to widespread pain we see amongst clients who are not fully leveraging sales content nor unified in their sales and marketing approach.  In addition to hefty year-over-year growth for Seismic itself, Winter further illustrated momentum with data such as a 220% increase in sales enablement job titles on LinkedIn in just two years.

Here are four key takeaways we drew from the conference and what we would challenge Sales, Sales Ops, and Sales Enablement leaders to think about as their organization implements a sales enablement solution.

How common is this scenario between Sales and Marketing at companies you’ve worked for?

Sales depends on Marketing to nail down the target customer and deliver leads.

Yet when the leads come in, the vast majority are not qualified.

As a result, the Sales team gripes about needing more help from Marketing.

After all, they’ve got a big budget – what are they spending it on?

Regardless of how marketing allocates budget and resources, I would bet the most common issue behind the conflict and misalignment is a lack of well-defined buyer personas.

Buyer personas create a common language between Sales and Marketing to talk about the real people who represent your ideal customer. The quicker you can relate to these target customers and address their pains and goals (at the top the funnel), the better you can meet their needs in every marketing or sales interaction down the funnel.

Like oil and water, Sales and Marketing teams don’t always “mix” the way they’re supposed to, and at worst, will view each other with suspicion or blame. This is a sad and ironic truth, given that everything these two teams do should support a singular goal of growing revenue. 

The benefits of sales and marketing alignment are compelling.  Together, these teams have the potential to reduce the sales cycle, meet the needs of high value customers across their buyer’s journey, and directly link ROI to marketing initiatives.

Underscoring the importance of a blended marketing and sales skill set, Forrester Research says the most successful sales people will become hybrid marketers¹. By 2020, the need for B2B salespeople will change to demand a more “consultative seller”.

How can Sales and Marketing work more effectively together? 

Based on our experience addressing these opportunities for clients, and our first-hand experience with marketing and sales collaboration at Symmetrics Group, here are 6 strategies for achieving sales and marketing alignment.

As part of our Top Performers in Sales series, we recently had the privilege of interviewing Ed Calnan, Founder and President of sales enablement solution provider Seismic.  Ed offers perspectives on high performance sales from two angles -- as a leader of a high growth SaaS company, and as an enabler of sales productivity and collaboration for Seismic customers.

When asked what differentiates the best people in sales, Ed cites three key traits: 1) The ability to understand and navigate organizations, 2) Proficiency in addressing business problems, and 3) Discipline to learn from wins and losses. Ed and his Seismic team are uniquely skilled at these pursuits as innovators in customer engagement, sales process, and Account Based Marketing.

We asked the best of the best of our sales superstar network to tell us what drives their off-the-charts performance.

The world of sales is changing. Here are 10 sales facts you need to know to stay ahead of the game.

Do these comments sound familiar from your organization?  These are real quotes derived from interviews with sales people and other functions in various companies.

1. “All they do is sit in meetings all day”
2. “They never answer my calls and I never hear back”
3. “He/she must have a 4 handicap in golf by now”

I read a post from Jason Averbook, CEO of Knowledge Infusion, and was inspired to apply his thinking to the state of B2B sales, especially with the first of three Presidential debates televised this evening. Given that the presidential election is almost upon us, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit the title of this post, and  famous political question, from a perspective of the major drivers of sales effectiveness.

The SEC’s Challenger Sales research has generated a lot of discussion and in conversations w/ some colleagues and ex-colleagues in the sales effectiveness space the past couple of weeks, we have discussed how to build this type of skill across his team in a sustainable way, not just run another training event.