Sales Pipeline Management – Forecast

Jun 2024

Dynamic account portfolio maximizes sales revenue

Perpetos helped a global industry leader in premium label solutions to develop its customer portfolio and optimize it

Dynamic account portfolio maximizes sales revenue

Luc Vanheule | Sales Performance, Sales Pipeline Management – Forecast

Perpetos helped a global industry leader in premium label solutions to develop its customer portfolio and optimize it in a dynamic way. As a result, the organization was able to maximize its sales results.

The challenge: the right time and effort for every customer

The label solutions company had gone through an impressive growth in recent years. Unfortunately, this had gradually complicated the global organization of sales. Because of multiple acquisitions, sales were no longer organized in a uniform way.

The organization had always classified its customers based on past sales results. However, because of changing market conditions, the share of wallet of customers had become much more dynamic. This made it increasingly difficult for the sales organization to allocate the right amount of time and effort to the right accounts.

The label company also lacked understanding of its customers’ true potential and there was a big variety in the degree in which sales people followed up on their opportunities.

When contacting Perpetos, the sales team was looking to solve the following challenges:

How to target the right customers
How to spend the right amount of time with customers according to growth potential, without losing turnover from current big accounts
How to assign the right customer portfolio to the right sales representative, based on sales skills
How to make sure sales people apply the right mix of tactics to achieve their sales targets
How to support sales in their skill development

The solution: dynamic account portfolio

Perpetos implemented a program to help sales develop their customer base and to dynamically optimize their customer portfolio. This would help the organization to maximize revenue per salesperson by spending the right amount of effort to the right accounts.

The label company was looking for a practical approach and implementation without extensive theoretical analysis. The goal was to achieve quick results and to stimulate motivation and readiness for change as much as possible. The organization also wanted to gradually improve its market visibility and identify the highest-potential growth areas by geography, market and solution.

Sales team scan

Perpetos started with a quick scan of the sales team. This was an important step towards making better use of the people in the team to realize the sales goals. The audit uncovered different sales profiles, as well as the team’s strengths and points of improvement. The results of the scan were translated into concrete action points.

Dynamic micro-segmentation

Next, customers were categorized based on their annual purchase amount and revenue of recent years. This resulted in four micro-segments based on share of wallet. For every customer segment, the team determined which activities were needed to maximize the share of wallet.

The team was asked to:

Indicate the total addressable market: which portion of the label purchase was not interesting, because the organization’s solutions or price were not a fit?
Determine the importance of a customer, based on their realistic potential within three years, on the condition that this customer receives the right amount of attention and service.
Analyze the numbers for every sales representative and propose a good enough starting point for the next steps in the program.

Next, the customer base was divided into four different segments based on growth potential and on the required efforts to realize that potential. This micro-segmentation was dynamic, and enabled the team to make changes immediately visible to the rest of the organization.

The objective of the program was for the sales staff to spend their time on the growth opportunities with the highest chance of success. Support from marketing and customer service was also aligned with the modified approach, so that sales could focus fully on developing growth.

Optimization of sales activities

Based on the micro-segmentation, the individual and team-based sales activities were optimized. The optimization took three elements into consideration:

Is the mix of customers correctly distributed among the salespeople based on their strengths and experience?
Has the team set the right priorities to maximize results together, within available sales time?
Are sales and marketing activities correctly aligned with growth potential, available production capacity and competitive advantages?

The result: clear path for transformation

The success of this transformation program
was the result of:

The integration of the customer’s sales team and the Perpetos staff into one close-knit team, as a result of the Perpetos Customer-Centric program design
A step-wise implementation targeting measurable impact
Closing the gap between knowing and doing, and making it stick with each participant
Close cooperation with sales management
Extra individual mentoring and guidance for sales and their management

Do you also want to maximize your sales revenue? Get in touch

May 2024

Why CRM Implementations Often Fall Short and How to Address It

In a world where customer relationships are the backbone of successful businesses, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is at

Why CRM Implementations Often Fall Short and How to Address It

Luc Vanheule | Sales Enablement, Sales Performance, Sales Pipeline Management – Forecast

In a world where customer relationships are the backbone of successful businesses, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is at the heart of company strategies. Yet, the stark reality is that many CRM implementations don’t deliver the expected results. CRM implementations often fail due to reliance on standard configurations, a focus on financial rather than sales support, and a narrow view of the sales funnel. To improve outcomes, customize your CRM to reflect your unique sales processes, simplify data entry to enhance adoption, and tailor screens and reports for operational support. Want to learn more? Continue reading.

Failure of CRM implementations leads to frustration within teams, wasted investments, and ultimately, a disconnect between what sales teams expect and what CRM systems deliver. But why do so many CRM initiatives fail, and more importantly, what can we do to overcome these challenges?

Core Reasons for CRM Implementation Failures

1. Standard Configurations vs. Customization

Many organizations start with a standard CRM configuration that isn’t finetuned to their unique processes and needs. This one-size-fits-all model often overlooks the specific dynamics and requirements of the business, resulting in underutilization of the system.

2. Focusing on Financial Drivers Over Sales Support

Another common issue is that CRM systems are primarily set up to feed financial systems, with little consideration for the actual support of sales processes. This creates a gap between what salespeople need and the functionalities of the system.

3. Limited Focus on the Final Stages of the Funnel

Many CRM solutions concentrate only on the last steps of the sales funnel, ignoring crucial aspects of the entire customer journey. This leads to an incomplete understanding of the customer experience and missed opportunities for early engagement.

The result of these missteps is a CRM system that is perceived as more of a burden than a tool, with inaccurate data due to a lack of use by the sales teams.

Can you avoid this? Yes you can. Read on to find out how.

Solutions for More Effective CRM Implementations

Reflect Reality in Your CRM

It’s crucial that your CRM system is an accurate reflection of how your customers actually buy. This requires a thorough analysis and customization of the system to accurately mirror the unique selling and buying processes of your organization. Is your sales process aligned to the way your customer buys? Does your sales process support the different product/market combinations, or is it too rigid to support these different situations? For example, you can start applying the Buying Clock® methodology, very easily in your CRM.

Simplify Data Entry

By limiting data entry to essential information, the CRM system is perceived as a supportive tool rather than an administrative burden. This significantly increases adoption among salespeople and improves data quality. Don’t expect salespeople to document elaborate sales reports in your CRM. By limiting to those parameters that allow the salesperson as the manager to think strategically about the opportunity, the CRM becomes a strong sales tool and not a necessary admin application.

Customize Screens and Reports

Make the CRM tool truly valuable for your team by defining screens and reports that support day-to-day operational activities. This ensures that the tool is seen as an integral part of the sales process.

Conclusion and Call to Action

A thoughtful, customized approach to CRM can bridge the gap between technology and user, making your investment truly pay off. Different customers already benefit from this approach.

If you recognize these issues and are seeking expert help to refine your CRM strategy and prevent failure, it’s time to take action.

Is this limited only to those who are implementing a new CRM. Certainly not, even with existing CRM applications you can create a strong impact on the effective use of your CRM with a minimum of modifications.

Reach out to experts with deep experience in tailoring CRM systems to the unique needs of businesses. Together, we can chart a course to a CRM solution that not only meets the needs of your financial system but also empowers your sales team and contributes to a seamless, effective customer journey.

Jan 2024

How Mastering the new reality of Sales: Navigating Longer Sales Cycles in the Tech Industry

Sales leaders in the tech industry can detect the challenge of longer sales cycles through a few key

How Mastering the new reality of Sales: Navigating Longer Sales Cycles in the Tech Industry

Luc Vanheule | Customer Journey, Sales Content, Sales Performance, Sales Pipeline Management – Forecast

Challenge: Identifying Lengthy Sales Cycles

Sales leaders in the tech industry can detect the challenge of longer sales cycles through a few key indicators within their organizations. This might manifest as an increasing time between initial customer contact and deal closure, a growing number of touchpoints or interactions needed before a sale is secured, or feedback from the sales team about the complexities and delays in customer decision-making processes. It’s often noticeable in the form of elongated negotiations, extended pilot programs, or increased requirements for technical validations.

Root Causes for Longer Sales Cycles

Several factors contribute to longer sales cycles in the tech sector:

Complex Decision-Making Units: Tech purchases often involve a multitude of stakeholders, each with their own set of concerns and requirements. The decision-making unit may include IT professionals, end-users, financial controllers, and senior executives, each needing to be convinced of the problem, why it has to be solved now and how you are unique in solving their challenge.

Complexity of Customer Problems: Customers are seeking solutions for increasingly complex problems, which require sophisticated and customized tech solutions. Understanding these complexities and tailoring the sales approach to address them specifically can extend the duration of the sales cycle.

Budget Cycles and Financial Scrutiny: Given the significant investment often associated with technology solutions, purchases may be tied to customers’ fiscal planning cycles and subjected to rigorous financial scrutiny and require having everybody aligned on the necessity of the investment to be done

Market Saturation and Competition: A crowded marketplace means that customers often have many options to consider, leading to a more extended comparison and evaluation phase.

Regulatory and Compliance Issues: Especially in industries like healthcare or finance, sales are impacted by various regulatory and compliance requirements, which can further lengthen the sales process as these boxes need to be checked before a deal can progress.

Strategies to Anticipate and Navigate Longer Sales Cycles

To anticipate and effectively manage these extended sales cycles, consider the following strategic approaches:

Align Sales and Marketing with Customer Buying Behaviors: Develop a sales and marketing strategy that is in lockstep with the customer’s buying behavior. This involves creating a common understanding of how your customers buy, what the right conversation should be with the different stakeholders, and which are the key touchpoints. The fact that every customer is unique in his or her behavior, you need a fuzzy logic approach that can align to each different situation. Creating the capabilities in your team for understanding where the potential customer is in their buying readiness is key. Utilize data analytics to predict when customers are most likely to engage, allowing sales teams to initiate the right conversations at the right time. Content marketing should be leveraged to educate and nurture leads throughout the buying process, providing them with the information they need when they need it, effectively shortening the sales cycle by aligning with their pace and progress.
Facilitate Buying Committee Alignment: Since tech purchases often involve a committee, it’s essential to align your sales process with the various stages of their buying journey. This means understanding the unique concerns and criteria of each stakeholder and tailoring communication to address these points. Sales representatives should aim to facilitate consensus among the committee by identifying and addressing the specific needs of each member. This might involve creating tailored conversations, aligned messaging and facilitating workshops or demonstrations that address collective and individual concerns. All while maintaining open lines of communication to ensure that all members move through the buying process together.
Simplify and Intuitize the Sales Approach: A complex sales process can be daunting for both the customer and the sales team. Streamlining the sales methodology to be simple and intuitive is critical. This can be achieved by using a simple metaphor that everybody can understand and that is easy to implement. It ideally outlines each step in the customer buying process, from initial issue awareness to post-sale follow-up.Training programs should focus on reinforcing these methods until they become second nature to the sales team. Additionally, employing tools such as CRM systems that provide prompts and reminders can help ensure that the sales methodology is consistently applied across all interactions.

By implementing these strategies, sales leaders in the tech industry can better prepare their teams to navigate the challenges of longer sales cycles, ultimately leading to more successful outcomes and sustained business growth.

A perfect way to handle these longer sales cycles, is with our Buying Clock®.
Read customer story.

Jun 2023

Why sales teams ignore marketing content

Companies invest a lot of money in developing content that supports sales, but often see no return on

Why sales teams ignore marketing content

Pascal Persyn | Competence Development, Lead generation, Remote Learning, Remote Selling, Sales and Marketing Alignment, Sales Content, Sales Enablement, Sales Performance, Sales Pipeline Management – Forecast

Companies invest a lot of money in developing content that supports sales, but often see no return on their investment. The reason for this is that the sales organization does not use the developed content, or isn’t using it enough. So what’s going on?

The impact of content usage and, by extension, sales enablement has been demonstrated many times before. According to figures from Miller Heiman Group in 2019, organizations without sales enablement achieve average win rates of 42.5%, while organizations with sales enablement achieve an average win rate of 49.0%, a huge 15.3% increase.

Sales content is not marketing content

Content plays a crucial role in different phases of the buying cycle. It can accelerate the sales process and significantly reduce sales costs. But what exactly do we mean by sales content?

Content for:

onboarding when launching new products or services
important announcements with regard to the sales strategy
preparing for customer contact moments
during the contact moment
follow-up after the contact moment
training and coaching salespeople

Apparently, it turns out that salespeople don’t find enough of this kind of content in the materials produced by marketing departments. The reason for this comes from the purpose that marketing content serves, i.e. to influence the market based on its own strengths, and to lead as many interested parties as possible through the famous marketing funnel, with little variation in the message – ‘one-to-many communication’ – as quickly as possible, from awareness to buying intent.

Content that is developed for this purpose has some specific characteristics:

the customer searches for and discovers the content under their own initiative (inbound marketing)
the content reaches the customer online or via an automated process (outbound marketing)
the effectiveness of the content is measured using KPIs such as clicks, reading time or number of shares
the ultimate goal of the content is to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

From funnel to unique journey

Many organizations still believe the MQL simply needs handing over to the salesperson who then just has an easy tap-in to score the goal. The customer has already passed through the entire marketing funnel, so all sales has to do is cash in on the marketing effort.

But this belief is – of course – misguided. The idea that a customer will dutifully go through a content funnel, and immediately be willing to buy at the end of that journey, is not the case in practice. Content is consumed for various reasons in this marketing funnel, and there are sure to be interested parties for your product, but people also download your ebook out of curiosity, or scroll through your website, to ultimately discover it’s not what they’re looking for. So who says your MQL has the required budget, or can make a decision or even influence it?

The marketing funnel in no way helps to predict the customer’s buying intent or willingness to buy. And it tells us little about which phase in the buying journey the customer finds themselves. The buying journey is therefore anything but linear, and it’s unique for each customer. When the salesperson starts working with an MQL, they always intervene at a different moment in the buying journey. And that requires specific content.

Sales content that works

It’s impossible for the marketing content mentioned above to satisfy the non-linear need. After all, marketing content is fundamentally different from sales content. The latter needs to support a salesperson before, during and after sales conversations. The customer does not consume it directly; they access it through personal interaction with the salesperson.

To increase the use of content in sales and so improve sales productivity, make sure your sales content has these characteristics:

Snackable: short and powerful, simple to use and easy to understand
Accessible and quickly findable, so salespeople can spend more time selling and less time searching for content
Adapted to the customer’s mental stage in the buying journey
Interactive: inviting participation and interaction
Just in time: supportive for the salesperson in every phase – from preparing for the customer conversation, to interactions with the customer, and in the follow-up process
Focused on action: usable, helpful and encouraging action.

Are you ready to get to work on your sales content strategy? Let us know!

Jul 2020

Forecasts in uncertain times

Pascal Persyn | Remote Selling, Sales Pipeline Management – Forecast

In this article we will focus on commercial forecasting, i.e. we will look at unsigned orders and contracts. Sales forecasts are never easy. However, in uncertain times it’s no exaggeration to speak about “unpredictability”. This is certainly true if the following factors are combined:

Project and/or recurring sales
Direct and indirect sales, co-selling and working with agents
Complexity of the deal (product mix, size,…)
Buying cycle variety: number of people involved – buying experience,…
Length of the selling cycle
Experience of salespeople and their management
Composition of the territory, regions and product mix per salesperson
Market share, brand awareness and competitive strengths

A brief survey during our webinar has made it clear that when making their forecasts, enterprises mainly struggle with delays in making decisions and the reliability of data. This leads to all kinds of complex processes, Excel worksheets outside the scope of the CRM and uncertainties.

Fortunately, there are ways to drastically reduce this unpredictability and at the same time enable management to undertake action in time and proactively. This is even more important in uncertain times.

An “agile forecast” is best composed of:

3 parallel scenarios that allow an analysis of the frictions as well as timely decisions. These scenarios are typical: the worst possible result, the most realistic outcome and the scenario that is feasible with some luck.
No targets and forecasts on the basis of the calendar year or the fiscal year. It’s preferable to work with a rolling forecast of four quarters. In other words, a new quarter is added after every quarter.

The combination of proper visibility and accuracy and the continuous improvement of the quality of your sales require a number of conditions or criteria to be met:

The same mechanism should be used, from the individual salesperson up to management level
There must be a constant visibility of 4 quarters
Several parallel scenarios (as mentioned above)
Use buying phases as a process rather than the salesperson’s selling phases. This is crucial as a solution for the continued delay in the decision-making process. More information can be found in the blog and the webinar about (CTA to blog 2)
The criteria for the calculation of the scenarios must be based on verifiable customer information. A typical example: Has the budget been approved and is it available?

A forecast made in this manner has major permanent advantages:

Better use of the selling time and support
Maximum visibility, and the possibility to make adjustments in time…
Less complexity thanks to the uniform process and way of working throughout the company and the avoidance of parallel work in CRM and Excel worksheets
Continuous process that significantly simplifies the annual planning, while avoiding the complex quarterly business reviews (QBR).
Uniform system that makes consolidation possible in spite of high diversity

The coaching and developing of sales talent is a major secondary effect of this way of working. Good salespeople will use this system for self-coaching and thus achieve even better results.

Category: Sales Pipeline Management – Forecast