More leads, more appointments, more customers, more sales, and more revenue – these phrases will echo through boardrooms and casual conversations alike as companies around the world gear up for their 2025 planning sessions in the coming weeks. This mantra of “more” will be heard in various settings, from informal chats by the water cooler to elaborate strategic offsite meetings. While the underlying principles of growth and expansion remain consistent, the practical application and interpretation of these concepts can vary significantly depending on the context and the organisation’s specific circumstances. Sales process optimisation is unlikely to take up much of the conversation.

Many of these conversations will take place at offsite meetings though, which often run the risk of allocating an excessive amount of time to less critical matters while neglecting the truly important aspects. These strategic gatherings, while intended to be productive, can sometimes fall into the trap of misallocating resources and attention. Your experience of a typical strategy offsite may resemble something like the following scenario, where the balance between looking backwards to what has happened and looking forward to what needs to happen is often is not optimal:

What are the issues?

A deep dive into every possible metric that could be measured, with commentary on whether the results are good or bad for each area. The majority of the meeting time is spent here.

What more do we need to do as a consequence of the issues?

Once the issues are identified, time is spent proposing alternatives. “Sales are down? We need more sales!” “Not enough meetings? Let’s schedule more meetings!” This phase typically consumes the second-largest portion of meeting time.

How do we make the new things happen?

If sales are down, how will more sales be made? If more meetings are needed, how will we address the shortfall? Often, it is postponed for post-meeting follow-up. Maybe they are not even the right questions; maybe they could be: Should we focus on increasing the number of sales or the average sale value or both? And Should we increase the number of meetings or improve the quality of existing ones or both?

Unfortunately, too little time is spent discussing these questions during meetings.

You can probably see the obvious flaw in this approach. So why does it happen?

It is much easier to look backward at what has happened than it is to find solutions to problems. It is easier to add more than make difficult decisions about what to let go of. The good news is it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s look at a simple scenario:

A company needs more revenue, and that presents a few opportunities, such as:

1. A Sales Performance Incentive Fund (SPIF) to encourage the existing sales team to sell more.
2. Additional sales people to make more sales.
3. Additional marketing people to add more leads.
4. Additional lead sourcing tools/ software to help generate more prospects.
5. Outsourcing meeting generation to agencies to provide scale.
6. Review your existing sales processes to identify bottlenecks and redundant steps, determine where improvements can be made, and then make the necessary changes to the process to optimise it.

Spot the outlier in this list? It is not a finite list but just for illustration purposes but is fairly typical of the outcomes that may come from a sales/revenue discussion, with the exception of #6 – Sales process optimisation. This is the only item on the list that looks at reduction, streamlining what is already there, rather than adding additional resources and cost. The other difference is cost and scalability. Items 1-5 are either one-off fixes for a limited period of time or they require additional and ongoing expense; 6 is the only option that provides long-term sustainable growth.

So again, the question again is why do companies tend to just throw more at a problem rather than improve what they already have? Firstly, and it is the elephant in the room.

You are not as good as you think you are.

That does not mean you are bad; in fact, you may be very good, but you are not perfect, and your sales enablement and processes are definitely not perfect.

Secondly, there are ready-made solutions to solve the other issues. Whether they end up solving the issue is another matter, but they are packaged and presented as a surefire way to solve your problem.

On the other hand, doing the work for #6 is difficult, and what if there isn’t anything to improve? But imagine there is. Maybe optimising your sales process may mean you may not need more meetings as you are now targeting the right people at the right companies at the right time with the right tools. It may mean you do need to increase the number of sales made as you have increased the average value of each sale, or maybe your sales velocity is greater due to the removal of a redundant step in your sale process.

If you are confident that you have already done this recently and you have a sales process that is firing on all cylinders, then all power to you. If, on the other hand, you recognise that maybe there may be some improvement to be made, then I congratulate you. You have just taken the first step to a great 2025 and beyond.

Ray

The Sales Doctor

Consult | Assess | Recommend | Execute

Post by Ray King, 21st November 2024