The changeover to a new year is a great time for sales ops to take stock of what you’ve accomplished during the past year—and consider where you want to improve for the coming year.
Because sales ops is such a wide-ranging discipline, it’s almost certain that you’ve neglected at least one of the areas that you should be paying attention to. While sales ops can be really rewarding, it’s also very challenging, and practitioners have to be able to balance a lot of different priorities.
If you haven’t kept up to speed in a particular area or you’ve let something fall by the wayside, don’t pout and don’t cry because SellingBrew has a ton of resources to help you get back on track quickly. Here are some of our favorites that cover the gamut of sales operations responsibilities:
- Strategy development and ongoing refinement. The Anatomy of a Competition-Crushing Sales Strategy webinar examines what leading sales ops teams are doing to make their strategies more effective. It discusses the difference between strategy and tactics, the key elements of a strategy, and the top five tweaks and refinements that you can use to optimize your planning.
- Demand generation and prospective development. The training session on Avoiding Costly Mistakes in B2B Lead Generation offers practical advice from other practitioners who were willing to share stories about their problems with lead generation. It examines issues like leaving everything up to the salespeople, over-reliance on passive or in-bound mechanisms, aiming at leads too far along in the decision process, throwing up hurdles in the early stages, and lack of meaningful prospect cultivation processes. More importantly, it explains how other companies have overcome those challenges.
- Sales pipeline and sales process optimization. All too often, sales ops teams think that they have to make a big change to their sales processes if they want to see a big improvement in their numbers. In reality, it’s much easier to get those big improvements by making small, targeted changes in just the right places. The webinar How to Optimize Your Sales Process walks you through a proven process that other sales and sales ops teams have used to drive huge increases in their sales performance.
- Pricing, discounting, and negotiation improvement. Pricing is a constant source of tension at many B2B companies. In order to close a sale, most salespeople are willing to do almost anything—including offering deep discounts. The training video on Getting Salespeople to Price Better offers a strategy for overcoming this natural inclination and getting sales on board with effective pricing.
- Prescriptive account and territory planning. Account planning doesn’t have to be—and shouldn’t be—just busywork. Leading-Edge Account and Territory Planning explains how some B2B firms are using the account planning process to create true growth plans for each of their customers. It teaches you five key strategies and tactics that will help you identify and capture more opportunities within your customer base.
- Sales training program design and development. At a lot of B2B companies, the existing sales training gets reps fired up in the short-term, but it does little to improve sales in the long term. The session on Maximizing the Effectiveness of Sales Training shows you how to design a training program that really works for your company.
- Account expansion and customer retention. Everyone knows that it’s cheaper to keep a current customer than to go out and get a new one, but few people truly understand what it takes to improve retention. The webinar How to Retain Your Key Customers demystifies the process and offers a wealth of helpful tips.
If you work through that list, you’ll have plenty to keep you busy through the holiday season and well into the next year. These webinars are a great way to get a jump start on your sales ops New Year’s resolutions and get excited for all your team can accomplish in 2017.
Anatomy of a Competition-Crushing Sales Strategy
The better your sales strategy, the easier it is for your sales team to achieve their objectives. But sales strategy is often misunderstood. In this on-demand training session, learn how leading sales operations are improving their sales strategies to win more business, while actually competing less.
Avoiding Costly Mistakes in B2B Lead Generation
Finding ways to improve lead quality and quantity can be a target that's constantly moving. This recorded training session exposes our latest research, highlights common lead generation challenges and what some B2B companies are doing to overcome them.
How to Optimize Your Sales Funnel
With so many different variables involved, improving sales performance across the board and at-scale can seem like a daunting task. But with a different perspective on your sales funnel, you can generate huge improvements much more easily and with far less risk.
Getting Your Salespeople to Price Better
Chances are, the behavior of your salespeople will ultimately determine whether pricing strategies are effective or not. In this on-demand training seminar, learn proven approaches and strategies for getting your sales team to price and discount far more effectively.
Leading Edge Account & Territory Planning
Sales planning is often perceived as not much more than tactical busywork. In this on-demand training session, you'll learn how innovative sales operations are taking a radically different approach to identify untapped growth opportunities and develop prescriptive account and territory plans.
Maximizing the Effectiveness of Sales Training
Research shows that most sales training programs just don't "stick" over the long term. In this on-demand training session, we explore proven strategies and critical steps for developing effective sales training programs that have "stickiness" built-in from the very beginning.
How to Retain Your Key Customers
When you lose business from existing accounts, the sales team must acquire even more new business to compensate. In this on-demand training session, learn about seven innovative strategies leading sales operations are using to minimize revenue attrition and customer defection.
