Back Office Secrets to Free Your Sales Force

Joining us for today’s show is Biju Baby, a sales operations leader who knows how to support phenomenal revenue growth. His company has seen an outstanding 54 quarters of sequential revenue growth and Biju has been an instrumental part of the team the last six years. 

Today’s topic is back office support, how to make your company so easy to buy from and sell for that you win more deals. It’s difficult to grow revenue faster than your industry’s growth rate and faster than your competitors. Leverage SBI’s How to Make Your Number in 2018  to access a revenue growth methodology to hit your number quarter after quarter, and year after year. 

Biju Baby is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic of back office support as the Vice President of Global Sales Operations for Equinix. A public company with revenue of $3.6 billion, Equinix builds and operate data centers for customers to connect with each other. Listen as Biju demonstrates how to be a company that’s easy to buy from and a company that’s easy to sell for. 

Why this topic? Taking days to get a pricing decision frustrates customers. Delaying the closing of a deal because of lengthy legal reviews reduces win rates. Paying a sales rep incorrectly, and late, drives up turnover. It is hard enough to grow revenues faster than the industry and competitors. Try to not add to the level of difficulty by being hard to buy from and sell for. 

We begin the podcast with Biju explaining the three things he recommends to evaluate how easy your company to buy from and sell for.  The straight-forward advice from Biju is the starting point for you to evaluate your own company’s needs in this area. Listen as Biju explains how as you gather feedback from the sales force, how to distinguish between the signal and the noise. 

Listen as Biju provides a use case for how to make a company easy to buy from.  This involves pushing the pricing and approval process down into the field with identified thresholds and empowering the team to make those decisions in the field. Biju explains how to hold the field accountable to make sure that the thresholds are not broken. Most companies are not comfortable taking this approach and want to control everything at headquarters. The problem is that it becomes a bandwidth problem and things take too long. Listen as Biju explains how at Equinix they trust the field with such a critical decision, but also making sure that you’re following up on a quarterly basis that the thresholds don’t get broken. That’s a great example of how to push the pricing and approval process out into the field. 

Biju and I discuss the length of time it takes for an approval internally.  Equinix is a global document that spans across 21 countries and operates in a country manager model, yet Biju’s team can turnaround most decisions in 24-hours.  Think of the advantage that would give your sales team.  Listen as Biju and I discuss the steps required to put this in place.  

Time kills deals, yet we have all have experienced companies that make it difficult for you to award them business. If your company making it difficult to do business with you then it’s impacting your win rate.  Worse, ‘A’ Player sales candidates can sniff out companies that are difficult to buy from and sell for resulting in lost talent, and retention problems. Listen to this podcast to act on making your company easy to buy from and sell for. 

Have expectations gone up and left you wondering if you can make your number? Here is a tool that will help you understand if you have a chance at success. Take the Revenue Growth Diagnostic test and rate yourself against SBI’s sales and marketing strategy to find out if:

• Your revenue goal is realistic
• You will earn your bonus
• You will keep your job