90% of CEO’s State Their Sales Teams Are Working on the Wrong Activities

Learned over my career is that leveraged understanding activity tracking and focus are important to overcome business challenges facing businesses today. This learned methodology was created over my sales and marketing career to help teach teams how to preform and to ensure they focus on the most important activities and to help them know why these are the right tasks to prioritize. Today 90% of CEO’s said teams are focused on low payoff activities and the sales teams are calling the wrong people or do not understanding why they are doing the assigned activity.

This mis-alignment is a recipe for disaster in any organizations and was identified as one of the 10 critical problems facing CEO’s today. The details of all 10 problems limiting growth can be found here.

Focus is critical to success as there are many important activities yet few critical activities for today’s professionals. In this blog I focus on the marketing and sales disciplines/organizations yet if you would like a more general overview consider digesting these blogs: 2 Requirements for Sustainable Performance or Can a Simple Tool Help Organizational Change .

Why are sales and marketing team’s focused on low payoff activities and engaging the wrong people or not understanding why they are doing the assigned activity? Simply put, they are focused on important yet not critical activities. So what are Critical Activities? They are tasks prospects or customers must take to complete a buying decision. If it is not part of generating revenue, then it should not be part of the marketing and sales teams activities. And if you cannot track and define the activity with a direct component of the end-to-end sales journey, it is not a critical task.

I have written extensively improving organizational performance over my 15+ years with P/L expertise with $100+M in quota coupled with the 8+ years of entrepreneurial leadership execution leading sales and marketing organizations. I have a keen understanding to diagnose market conditions in an ever changing environment to over-achieve by staying focused and wanted to paraphrase the 3 most important:

1. Alignment: Ensure your targets and goals known and are aligned within the organization. Be sure you are working on activities your CEO has prioritized and are in your year-end goals. I am always surprised by how many individuals do not know what their goals are and are not tracking their performance.

2. FAST Goals: Every day focus on goals bring the focus necessary to keep generating revenue. The FAST methodology incorporates seamlessly with OKR’s (Objectives and key results) as well.

   1. Frequently Discussed: goals are not a once a month topic as they must be incorporated in ongoing conversations to ensure progress, resource allocation, priorities and direct feedback on results. Stay focused on critical activities.

   2. Ambitious: Goals should be hard to achieve yet not impossible. Creating a challenge boosts performance and focuses on innovative ways for achievement. Don’t settle for 100%, but create your own stretch goals to ensure you make the assigned targets.

   3. Specific: The goals must be concrete metrics with incremental milestones to ensure clarity on current results supported with how to achieve from here. Mid-course corrections are critical.

   4. Transparent: There should be no question about goals and each individual, team or organization must know their performance. Made public to support organizational alignment and responsibility to your peers.

3. Investments: Are you investing 80% of your time on the activities that deliver your goals? Always be asking, does this activity generate revenue and is it part of the end-to-end buying journey? This is where you determine if it is critical or simply important. Secondly, what are the 3-5 activities that will lead to achievement. Not realistic to more than 5 as you will never get to these activities. If not critical move to the smaller investment of 20% of your time.

These are practical real world learning from my “Inquisitor Learning Methodology” (ILM) to diagnose business challenges that help define critical underlying difficulties facing individuals, teams and organizations. The “Inquisitor Learning Methodology” asks discovery questions to gather and synthesize information to determine the potential underlying problems. Then, overlay that synthesis with a quantitative and qualitative analysis to align and validate the information. Those are combined with my experience to interpret the data to then document and take action

ILM output is designed to make incremental, tangible improvements by perceiving the core performance problems that can then enable an actionable plan to solve the challenge. I have used this proven process to create the necessary FOCUS for marketing and sales teams to achieve on average of 103.4% of their annual revenue targets.

Let’s discuss how we can apply this to your sales and marketing teams for immediate trajectory improvements.

Note:

These elements that are incorporated into the post:

· Real World Experiences: Lessons learned from my experiences are always bolded and blue.

· Critical Competencies: These are tangible proven skills sets that I have developed over my career. These should give insight into my competency and are highlighted in yellow.