Jennifer Bakunas, the Senior Vice President of Americas Sales for Monotype, has a wealth of experience, from spinning up successful start-ups to running enterprise sales teams. Jennifer took over the sales leadership role at Monotype last year and we join her at the end of year one to discuss her successful transformation of the 100+ person sales force.
In this show we’re going to demonstrate how a head of sales transforms a selling team to hit their growth objectives.
Why is this topic is so important? The honeymoon for a head of sales ends quickly. Successful SVP’s of Sales have one key thing in common. They get off to a fast start with a successful transformation that starts bearing fruit in year one.
Segment 1: The Sales Transformation
- Overview of sales team organization and the types of roles. minute 3:26
- How to approach assessing your sales leadership talent. minute 5:40
- Assessing talent at the individual rep level. minute 6:44
- Assessing the performance conditions of the sales force. minute 10:22
Skip to minute 5:06 when Stephanie details how she assesses her sales talent:
“In terms of the talent assessment that happens, you have to assess who you have, where the gaps are, and who you need to add. I think the best way to do that is sitting down, and you meeting every single individual on the sales team one-by-one….”
Segment 2: The Sales Plan
- Communicating with the sales team to keep them informed and focused on the right things. minute 13:22
- Using Slack as a collaboration tool with the sales team. minute 15:36
- How to approach segmenting your accounts. minute 17:11
- Ensuring you have the right sales org design. minute 18:48
- Transformation initiatives to lay the right foundation for success. minute 21:27
- Ensuring new transformation initiatives are adopted. minute 23:24
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Listen to minute 21:56 to hear Stephanie give advice on prioritizing transformation initiatives:
“That’s the magic. That’s the secret sauce. There are only so many hours in the day, so you have to make your priority list and ask yourself, “What’s my project plan? What’s going to make the most impact?”, etc. There’s a million things you can do every day, which I think is the biggest challenge when you’re in this role. You have to stay focused on the stuff that’s going to make the biggest impact…”
Segment 3: Pricing Strategy and Initiatives
- How to approach assessing your pricing strategy. minute 25:27
- Pricing approach and how the sales team can play a role. minute 27:18
Skip to minute 27:33 to listen to how Stephanie’s sales team reacted to the concept of pricing initiative.
“If sellers are comfortable, and they’re doing well, they don’t want anyone messing with their deals. So controls seem to be anti-seller mentality. I think it’s a balance. You need to do what’s right for the business, but you don’t want to put so many controls in place that it slows down deal velocity…”
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