Kick Your Sales Into Gear: 5 Foolproof Steps [#4 Your Current Position is a Work in Progress]

Michael Gear, GoodData’s Vice President of Sales & Field Ops, brings to you a five part blog series entitled, Kick Your Sales Into Gear: 5 Foolproof Steps. Over the next two weeks Michael will share with his wisdom and experience for improving both the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales organization.

1. #1 What’s Your Plan
2. #2 Who’s Leading the Charge
3. #3 The More Things Change

#4 Your Current Position is a Work in Progress

Which is why you always need to keep the Big Picture in clear view. You can’t manage what you can’t see. Getting the right information at the right time eliminates blind spots and gives you what’s needed to make the correct decisions. Determine your priorities. Optimize your sales leads. Get insight into every sales opportunity. You need this data to close more business and increase sales revenue.

The Big Picture of your current position includes the progress you’ve made toward quarterly goals across all regions and products. Where is the quarter going to finish? Use comprehensive sales data to visually show how much business has closed, what deals are expected to close, what deals are at risk and if anything significant happened to effect the quarter.

Simply stated: What is the overall outlook for the quarter?

By looking closely at actual performance versus the goals, your sales reps thoroughly understand the scope of work that still needs to be completed. Where is there progress? How are “actuals” trending towards goals? What is the path to reaching goals? Is your organization on track?

Real-time data-handling techniques will give you answers to these questions. Use the data to position your sales organization to meet its quarterly goals.

Make sure you scrutinize everything at the “current point” in the quarter. Things such as the planning of territories and quotas, the management of forecasts and sales representatives and the final review of what was attained.

Don’t wait for the future to come to you. Predict it. Address your key challenges. Deliver “intelligence” across your organization. Eliminate end-of-quarter surprises.

What is your current position?