Your Complete Guide to Starting the Fiscal Sales Year Fast
Wes Rudsenske, Vice President, Global Sales Strategy, Salesforce & Archana Subramanian, Senior Director, Sales Strategy and Operations, Salesforce
The last few months of the year can be chaotic (to say the least) for any sales organization. There are ways, however, to help you get ahead of fiscal planning so you and your sales reps can minimize distractions in Q4 and hit the ground running on the first day of the new fiscal year.
Prioritize and lay the groundwork.
In any fiscal planning, the first step is to establish your priorities. For most companies, revenue growth is the single most important success metric. Everything you do must be oriented around maximizing it from a sales strategy and operations perspective.
An important factor in your planning is to consider how to deploy your most valuable asset: your salespeople. You also need to project a long-term strategic plan and prioritize sequentially in terms of what you want to accomplish with regard to operating margin, profits, and more. In both instances, you must be thoughtful about how you prioritize your investments in order to achieve your goals.
Create a go-to-market strategy.
Once you have established your key priorities, you can start building out a go-to-market strategy that serves as a blueprint for your sales organization.
One of the most important questions to consider when creating a go-to-market strategy is, “How do I want to focus all of the selling teams across all of the different components of my business?” For any direct sales model, the vast majority of your investment dollars will go toward selling capacity or headcount. This is the primary investment bucket, so you will want to maximize the return on your investment. From a go-to-market perspective, it’s important to determine what market factors really influence sales for your company and to design a coverage model tailored to your needs. As you consider all of these factors and determine the optimum resource deployment depending on your business, the go-to-market will come together.
Put it into action.
Once you have the go-to-market strategy in place, it’s time to work through all of the components in order to operationalize that plan. That’s when you take it from a very high-level concept and put it into action for a fast start in the next fiscal year.
How do you take what you’re planning and actually deploy it out to the field?
To read the complete article, Your Complete Guide to Starting the Fiscal Sales Year Fast, visit Quotable.com.
