Connecting a business’s sales strategy across departments is critical for driving sustainable growth. By aligning goals, processes, and messaging, a cohesive sales strategy connects teams and promotes collaboration toward unified objectives. In this article, we will explore the impact that connecting sales strategy across an organization can have in enabling business growth.
Defining a Connected Sales Strategy
A connected sales strategy links together the plans and activities of all revenue-driving teams across an organization. This includes sales, marketing, product, customer success, and any other departments that impact pipeline and revenue generation. Rather than operating in silos with mismatched priorities, a connected strategy brings alignment through shared:
- Goals: Common quantitative targets related to leads, pipeline, retention, expansion, etc., that all teams work towards.
- Processes: Documented models and playbooks that depict cross-functional workflows.
- Messaging – Consistent positioning and value propositions tailored per person and market.
- Data: Centralized systems and revenue analytics that provide insights to optimize strategies.
- Culture: Leadership, incentives, and values that encourage collaboration vs competition.
By connecting these key elements across departments, sales leaders can create synergy between teams and ensure all efforts support overall business growth strategies.
Driving Growth Through Alignment
Fragmented departments waste resources through replication and incompatible priorities. Connecting sales strategy across team’s streamlines activities toward the outcomes most impactful for revenue growth, such as:
- Optimizing Lead Generation: Aligned process and data systems between marketing and sales enable accurate modeling, rapid iteration, and effective nurturing for higher conversion rates.
- Improving Conversion Rates: Consistent messaging and customer insight sharing between sales and customer success promotes seamless expansion and upsell opportunities.
- Increasing Deal Sizes: Ongoing collaboration between product marketing and sales results in well-packaged solutions that capture more significant customer wallet share.
- Shortening Sales Cycles: Early involvement between product, engineering, and sales identifies customer needs for highly tailored solutions.
- Expanding Market Share: Shared pipeline goals and territory strategies help sales and channel leaders rapidly grow and penetrate new segments.
The impact of connecting sales strategy is measurable through key performance indicators directly tied to growth, including year-over-year expansion in recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, net revenue retention rate, and new sales pipeline generated.
Case Study: AppDirect Grows Global SMB Presence
Global cloud service marketplace AppDirect struggled to align regional sales teams targeting the SMB market across territories. By connecting sales strategy company-wide, they accelerated a nascent segment from 10% to over 50% of new business within 18 months.
Their approach focused on:
Defining target SMB profiles, typical personas, messaging frameworks, and competitive positioning to equip sellers. Training further enabled teams to tailor conversations effectively.
Analyzing global data revealed SMB market nuances and guided adapted regional tactics to influence pipeline growth and conversion benchmarks aligned with growth goals.
Mapping account assignment rules and updating portals allowed complete visibility into global SMB pipeline health to optimize activities towards critical metrics.
Incentivizing cross-collaboration for co-selling elevated aptitude and enriched enterprise-level solutions to be packaged for SMB appeal.
This cohesive go-to-market drove efficiency, presenting a unified brand across markets. AppDirect continues to be a leading partner in supporting SMB customers’ comprehensive needs amid constantly evolving vertical SaaS solutions.
Key Challenges Leaders Face
While benefits clearly exist, sales leaders aiming to connect strategy better face barriers due to:
Siloed Systems and Data
Disjointed legacy technology across groups hinders insight sharing and executive visibility into end-to-end health. This slows decision-making and réactive adaptation needed for dynamic alignment.
Inconsistent Processes and Messaging
Mature workflow and communication barriers evolve within experienced teams, becoming engrained cultural barriers to seamless collaboration. Changing behaviors is challenging.
Lack of Cross-Departmental Cohesion
When sales are too far abstracted from product, marketing, or engineering insights, strategies cater to internal priorities rather than customer impact. Mismatched KPIs also incentivize the status quo.
Short Term Revenue Prioritization
In startup phases or turnarounds, immediate quota pressure from sales can limit resources for foundational initiatives like target account revisions, sales enablement, and martech integrations that support strategic connections.
Difficulty Quantifying Connectivity Value
Since benefits manifest over more extended periods through compounding efficiencies, direct ROI justification for connectivity investments is difficult compared to immediate revenue acceleration tactics.
Critical Takeaways for Sales Leaders
While connecting sales strategy holistically introduces complex orchestration, potential growth upside warrants executive attention to adopt critical practices:
- Map processes between sales stages and client journeys to identify friction points and areas for simplification.
- Understand existing data ecosystem limitations to build business cases for unified systems and analytics.
- Gather insight from cross-functional leadership to synthesize into cohesive messaging frameworks that resonate across roles.
- Set cadence for account strategy reviews between sales leaders globally to share best practices and trends that should shape regional priorities.
- Advocate for centralized sales enablement systems and encourage tangent role certifications for account teams to improve expertise.
- Develop core target use cases or client profiles within key industries to center outbound initiatives and amplify around, accelerating specialization.
- Report on lead generation and pipeline metrics tied to business outcomes across regions to showcase direct connectivity value. Quantify through the sales cycle or win rate lift when possible.
While connecting sales strategy demands upfront leadership involvement, potential efficiency gains and revenue acceleration over time make undertaking key initiatives well worthwhile for most sales organizations.
