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October 11, 2013
How an Iconic Sales Leader is Building His Plan for Next Year
By: Matt Sharrers
Fourth quarter always poses a dilemma for Sales VP’s. How can you finish strong while building next year’s plan? This fourth quarter planning session at your office will help you. You will see how sales leaders accomplished the following:
An Iconic Sales Leader
Jim has been in sales for 25 years. 16 of these years in sales leadership. He makes the number. Jim is the guy at the end of Q2 who doesn’t panic. He knows how to sort through the noise. He has missed the number once in his 16 years. Jim is as good as it gets.
Why Jim is Good—He has figured out how to make the complex simple. Jim has decided that his team can only drive 3 initiatives per year. Some of you might say, too many. Some would say too few. Who cares? Jim picked a number. He trained his sales leadership team at each company to expect change. He taught them how to drive new initiatives while maintain consistency on existing processes.
How Jim Does It
3 Variables: Effort, Probability of Success and Return.
How To Understand Jim’s Plan
Red, Black and Green bubbles—these initiatives will be ignored.
Light Blue—This initiative will make it. It is low effort, relatively high success opportunity and will not impact the direct sales force. It is targeted on the channel. This will get attention.
Gray—Sales process is less effort. It has been done by Jim’s team before. Not as big a return and high probability of success. Jim and his team will drive themselves.
Purple—Social selling. This initiative has a great deal of upside. It will require high effort but has a high probability of success. Jim will use most of his investment budget to drive social selling. Technology, training, process and tools.
What Jim Would Say You Should Do Now
The free onsite sessions have been very enlightening for many sales leaders. We have been fortunate to conduct execution focused sessions with some of the world’s leading sales forces. View some of the commentary here. If you are behind the number this year, next year is a make it or break it year. If you are going to make this year’s number, we would love to hear from you. What are you doing to build on your momentum? Share a comment below; nothing like hearing from another Jim.
Matt Sharrers is the CEO of SBI, a management consulting firm specialized in sales and marketing that is dedicated to helping you Make Your Number. Forbes recognizes SBI as one of The Best Management Consulting Firms in 2017.
Over the course of nearly a decade at SBI, Matt Sharrers was an instrumental early partner guiding SBI as the Senior Partner. Matt’s functional responsibilities included acting as the head of sales where he led SBI’s double-digit revenue growth, and was responsible for the hiring function to build SBI’s team of revenue generation experts.
Prior to joining SBI in 2009, Matt spent eleven years leading sales and marketing teams as a Vice President of Sales. Matt has “lived in the field.” As a result, he is the foremost expert in the art of separating fact from fiction as it relates to revenue growth best practices. CEOs and Private equity investors turn to Matt’s team at SBI when they need to unlock trapped growth inside of their companies.
Read full bio >
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