Are you among the 31% of CEOs concerned about revenue attainment when comparing their company’s results to their expectations? CEOs nowadays are routinely disappointed and increasingly frustrated, and their focus is shifting to finding out how to go about solving business challenges. Revenue shortfalls have a direct effect on profit.
Typically, there will be several false starts to fix the problem.
In our experience, many CEOs have a knee-jerk reaction when trying to turn around a revenue shortfall as they underestimate the problem. To find a rapid answer, they look to their sales leader and team to solve the problem. There is an expectation they should be able to identify problems and deliver solutions. However, solving business challenges by those who oversee sales daily is a disconnect as often they create the problem.
If the sales leader fails, CEOs begin making haphazard personnel decisions, looking at technological investments, altering their pricing strategy and business strategy, looking to softer markets, and using a variety of haphazard sales levers at the tactical level.
Trying to change your sales trajectory without fully understanding the causes and without a clear and customised plan can be expensive and off-target. The wrong moves can multiply the issues you are attempting to resolve.
Are you attempting to fix the wrong problem?
Asking for feedback internally, your initial investigation will most likely determine that your product and pricing are good, your positioning against competitors’ is right, and your reputation is good. You are in the right market and have a solid delivery record. Customer satisfaction and repeat orders are high, depending on your industry. But revenue achievement is not happening.
As the CEO, your focus must be on addressing the problems quickly and stabilising the business. As you know, this can affect your business and profitability in the short and long term. The longer your company is underperforming, the harder it becomes to turn around.
In the quest for a solution, you peel back the layers and look deeper into the business. You ask questions of your sales leader and marketing leader (if you have one) about their high-level Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These are great for insights into the performance of the business and its leadership. These KPIs demonstrate the abilities of the leadership and teams reporting to them. Some great questions are:
- Sales Revenue: Compare your monthly and quarterly sales revenue against goals. Review how much you are missing targets by each month and quarter. How long has this trend been occurring?
- Lead Generation and Conversion Rates: Evaluate whether marketing campaigns drive high-quality leads and whether those leads are being converted effectively. Is marketing spending increasing without improved output?
- Customer Retention: Analyse churn rates to determine if you are losing existing customers faster than acquiring new ones.
- Customer Acquisition: Are you securing new customers, or is your business reliant on the existing customer base? New customers are the test of competence for sales teams.
- Sales Cycle Length: Has the time taken to close deals increased?
- Pipeline Health: Assess the robustness of your sales pipeline. A dwindling pipeline can be an early warning sign of trouble, and an over-full pipeline that does not close is a sign of pipeline puffery.
But are these answers the cause of your business challenge? Most likely not; they are indicators of far deeper problems.
As CEO, you are starting to understand the breadth of health problems in the business. You are beginning to understand that these are complex problems requiring expert problem-solving solutions.
Often misunderstood or misaligned
Given the complexities of marketing, it is easy to assume that everything is fine through conversations with the marketing leadership or agencies. For many CEOs, marketing is a black art with an age-old focus on PR and branding. However, today, they must support sales efforts directly.
Buyers have changed, putting downward pressure on marketing and sales to perform. If your business is out of alignment, it will show directly in your topline revenue attainment.
Are your marketing and sales aligned? It is imperative they are to deliver your revenue number.
If your sales team relies on relationships for selling, a traditional approach for many businesses, this can cause issues in the business, such as a lack of new business achievement. Companies operating with relationship selling require a strong marketing effort with the right tentacles connected to the sales process to support growth and expansion.
Marketing today directly impacts your company’s ability to generate leads and retain customers. If the wrong people are attracted to the business, sales will suffer in their ability to close deals and sign new business.
Marketing problems can include wrong messaging, lack of marketing, over-expenditure, wrong channels, wrong technology, siloing from sales, generation of poor selling tools, and underperforming digital assets.
How deep can the problems be to solve this business challenge?
Underlying marketing and sales are some sixty distinct levers that must be set correctly for the company to deliver growth year after year. Pull the wrong lever, miss a lever or two, and your business will start to operate ineffectively, dragging the revenue attainment backwards.
Taking Action to Solve Business Challenges
It would be fair to say that if you have travelled the journey above, it is time to engage an expert in sales and marketing who can provide unbiased insights and recommendations. External perspectives can reveal blind spots and hidden issues and provide fresh ideas to drive growth.
The Sales and Marketing Business Review will identify and solve business challenges through:
- Clear Understanding of Current Performance: Which areas require enhancement and perform well, and where are bottlenecks present?
- Marketing and Sales Alignment: Enhance sales conversions, generate higher-quality leads, and better align your teams. You will acquire knowledge regarding the areas in which enhancements can be implemented to cultivate a more cohesive, high-performing sales and marketing partnership.
- Evaluation of Data, Technology, and Tools: Identify opportunities to optimise your technology infrastructure, integrate systems for improved data flow, and utilise tools that improve efficiency and decision-making.
- Lead Generation and Nurturing Strategies: Practical insights into the refinement of lead generation strategies, the enhancement of lead nurturing, and the delivery of high-quality, sales-ready leads to sales.
- Sales Process and Conversion Optimisation: A comprehensive comprehension of the optimisation of your sales process to reduce sales cycles and increase conversion rates.
- Sales Force Structure and Capacity Planning: Optimising the performance of sales team members and the return on investment (ROI) of their expenses to achieve the highest possible profit.
- Marketing ROI and Effectiveness: Maximise your marketing budget, reallocate resources to high-impact initiatives, and achieve a higher return on your marketing strategy.
- Actionable Recommendations and Roadmap: You will leave with a comprehensive plan of action and the subsequent steps necessary to align your sales and marketing teams, increase efficiency, and accelerate growth.
- Measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Continuous Success: You can evaluate progress and guarantee that your sales and marketing teams are operating at their optimal level.
Sales Focus Advisory can assist your team with the implementation of the recommendations. Every company is unique in the problems it deals with and the problems CEOs aim to resolve. The forty-to-sixty-page report is specifically for your company and contains thorough implementation action plans.
Adele Crane, director, completes marketing and sales business reviews. She is renowned for her extraordinary diagnostics of businesses and her ability to provide candid and in-depth knowledge that assists companies in realising revenue improvement. With over 200 reviews completed, her keen diagnostic capabilities and actionable insights enable senior executives to prioritise initiatives that maximise topline growth and bottom-line performance. She is renowned for delivering results in shorter time frames.
If you are focused on solving business challenges, schedule a time for an initial discussion with Adele at this link.
If you found this article helpful, follow us on LinkedIn or subscribe to Our Insights in the right-hand column of this page to receive new posts as they are published.
You may also be interested in reading these articles:
- Actions CEOs Take When Business Results Fail
- CEOs: Why Aligning Marketing & Sales is Now Operationally Vital
- Streamlining Revenue Operations: The Secret to Surging Profits
© 2024 Sales Focus Advisory. All Rights Reserved.
