Think back to 1991, 2001, and 2008. In times of market volatility, the companies that emerge stronger in the face of adversity are those that act with ruthless prioritization and unwavering commitment. I believe these organizations are focusing on two key things, especially in revenue operations, to drive efficiency and scalability in a down market: consistency and repeatability.
So how can you achieve consistency and repeatability? The level of standardization within your revenue workflow is paramount. Revenue officers have to make sure, as my grandmother used to say, that everyone is singing from the same songbook. To scale, invest in building a framework that codifies time-tested and proven actions and delivers them to customer-facing employees at the right time, with predictability and cycle-time efficiency. You need to drive results.
Today, this can be achieved through proactive engagement models that capture buyer signals and translate them into seller actions. This engagement model builds on a set of proven workflows to drive proper behavior and deliver consistent results.
Stability in unpredictable times
To some extent, a loss of reproducibility is inevitable as companies scale. If she has 10 employees who interact with customers, a revenue leader can walk around the office every day, inspect what her team is doing, and guide them in the same direction, even without the technology to support them. Masu. But for revenue-generating organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees, this level of visibility can be a challenge and inhibit growth in a volatile economic environment.
Without visibility across the sales organization, revenue leaders don't know how to integrate feedback from the market or differentiate between seller perception and actual deal trends. They don't know why Justin got the deal and Robert didn't. Was it because Justin had a more compelling value proposition, or was it because he had a better relationship with his customers? Leaders know they want more deals like Justin's, but I don't know how to reproduce that at scale.
Every company has a few sellers like Justin who drive the most important performance. Revenue leaders need to have an execution system that identifies exactly what their sellers are doing right, codifies it, and standardizes that behavior in their workflows. Tier 2 and Tier 3 players.
But that doesn't mean there isn't room for employees to play to their strengths. Diversity is an asset to business. But it's important to ensure that salespeople have the right resources to execute consistently and reproducibly, and that revenue leaders can inspect, measure, and iterate to drive new behaviors and improve It's about ensuring that processes can be optimized across a wide range of customer organizations.
Standardized workflows help revenue teams feel more confident, motivated, and connected to customer and business outcomes. Improving performance can also have a positive impact on employee morale and retention, which is important for controlling costs in a tough economic environment.
AI will transform sales repeatability
Standardizing workflow within your sales organization starts with the right technology. When CRM first hit the market, it revolutionized sales by giving businesses a better way to capture and manage customer data.
Fast forward to today, and we have these huge systems of records that tell us everything we need to know about everything that's ever happened with every customer and prospect. While this is invaluable, one thing the CRM doesn't do with this data is tell the revenue team: what related to that how That's the key to consistency and reproducibility.
Enter artificial intelligence. AI is currently transforming nearly every industry and function, and sales is no exception. Tools like generative AI can help employees draft pitches, write reports, and follow up on meetings with unprecedented efficiency, but the real power of AI is that humans can It lies in its ability to identify the next best action to take within the structure of a workflow. Dozens of accounts.
Until recently, it has always been impossible to pinpoint which specific seller behaviors lead to successful company growth. With new AI capabilities, top-performing organizations are leveraging technology that can guide customer-facing employees to a prioritized set of actions that not only improve revenue but, more importantly, provide consistent customer support. proven to promote performance and satisfaction. This level of sophistication will improve earnings predictability and consistency like never before and will be a key driver of earnings growth and capital efficiency in 2024 and beyond.
If your CRM is your scouting report, your AI-powered revenue workflow is your strategy. And in a down market, harnessing the power of AI to drive smarter decisions can be the difference between winners and losers. Whether a competing team has good players doesn't really matter if those players perform sporadically and without direction. But if your revenue team has the power of Revenue Workflow His Handbook, you can beat your competitors, consistently and repeatedly, every time.
Optimize time to trust and value with workflows
A referable customer army is also a key factor for expansion in any economy, especially a down economy. Throughout my career, I've learned that there are three things that are most important when designing a revenue process to build an army.
- Cycle time: How quickly can you convert prospects into customers?
- Financial commitment from buyer: Buyers want to reduce risk and in doing so may delay the process or ask for significant financial concessions.
- Reference time: If your goal is to build a customer pool, you need to turn your prospects into independent, referable customers.
The key to turning this triangle into a flywheel is optimizing “time to trust” and “time to value.”
When buyers trust you, your product, and your processes, their risk mitigation mindset will be minimized and they will be the ones forcing you to step on the gas and go faster.
By establishing trust early and following up with sustainable value, you can more effectively convert that customer into a reference customer. That customer pool helps you generate your next lead with more confidence and conviction, which in turn helps reduce cycle time, financial commitment, and time to value. The flywheel accelerates.
Establishing trust and establishing value are very similar movements. It all starts with improving your revenue workflow. Coding your workflows makes them consistent, repeatable, and allows for scalable growth.
First mover mindset: A new era of market leaders and lessons learned from the early 2000s
Historically, go-to-market spending for returning companies has been opaque and inefficient because quotas have often been achieved by a smaller than desired percentage of the employee base achieving the quota.
With the power of enterprise sales engagement technology, a new era of market leaders will emerge among companies that adopt first-mover thinking and implement workflow solutions at scale. This is a repeat of a similar move witnessed in the early 2000s with his SaaS platforms such as Salesforce. Companies that remained tied to outdated technology were unable to catch up with first movers and ultimately struggled to attract and retain top talent, gravitating toward first mover mentality and the consequences that came with it. Just as the best-performing sellers mandated their companies to use their SaaS CRMs in the mid-2000s, we will see a similar movement with sales engagement platforms in 2024 and beyond.