Episode 96: How to Start 2025 in the Best Possible Way to Achieve Your Sales Goals

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits. Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered sales teams. Happy New Year. The podcast has dropped. I know everyone is up early, eagerly awaiting the first Strongest sales teams podcast for 2025. At the time this is launching, no doubt many of you are still asleep, have just gone to bed, and some of you might even still be seeing in the new year with some serious vigor and fun. I hope everyone out there had a fantastic Christmas and I hope you had an equally enjoyable new year. By this point in time, we are hopefully over in Denver, Colorado, enjoying some skiing. But you never know how things work. Okay, so today, first episode of the new year, I wanted to focus on the fundamentals, the most important things that I think every sales leader and sales team need to nail to make sure they set themselves up for a furiously fantastic, enjoyable, successful and engaging 2025. And there is no easier way for me to do this than to talk about the five elements of every high performing team that I see predominantly appear. Now, this has been covered in varying parts across previous episodes and those who work with the business will know and understand this. But I really encourage everyone listening today to take the 20 minutes to really think about how you can apply or reapply this to your business. Because in my 25 years in selling, I have never, ever seen a business who didn't find some benefit in revisiting the basics and the fundamentals that they need to really drive performance. So today we're going to look at these five elements. I'll dive into them in a little bit of detail. If you're nursing a hangover, you've got my dulcet tones to ease into the week. If you pick this up later in the week. Welcome back. I hope you are enjoying your break, but you can think about this in some of your downtime as well. Right. So for every sales team that I have worked with over a 25 year period, I have seen five consistent elements come through from those who regularly succeed. We're gonna go through those five, but we're gonna start at the top and work all the way to the bottom. And that number one piece is having a sales strategy. Almost every sales leader that I've worked with, when we talk about sales strategy and sales process, their immediate reaction is, yeah, we have this, we've got this and we've got a down pat. However, when you start to dig a little bit deeper, it's rare that I haven't seen a sales team that has an opportunity to really improve what they're needing to do here when it comes to sales strategy. This is the core of where every successful sales team starts because it aligns that North Star where we need to head over the next 12 months. And by having that North Star really clear, it allows us to build out key goals, action items and behaviors that we need to be living up to to make sure our team is succeeding. Super important to get the goals right. Here's how a really successful process for setting up your sales strategy can work. First of all, we start with the company goals in themselves. Most companies, particularly those that are big enough to have sales leaders or sales teams, will have some key goals that they set out for the year ahead. Typically speaking, we're looking at three to five for most businesses. Within those goals, we need to have a look at what is most relevant for our sales team. If the goal is about moving offices, not so relevant if the goal is about increasing revenue lines or profitability or customer satisfaction scores or focus finding reasons that customers want to be working with us. Bang on point with what we should be looking at to impact through our sales team activities. So when we can first of all find out the business key goals and secondly, have a look at what the key financial goals are for the business that is setting our very broad playing field for us as a sales team. From there, what we can do is break these down into sales specific goals. For example, if the business had a revenue growth target across the business, we can then start to break down what that means for the sales team in terms of our prospecting, nurturing and closing activities. If we know that our business has a 35% growth target and that our team is responsible for all of the sales, well then it's easy. But if our team is a part of that growth target and there are other divisions, we need to have a look at what our role within that can be. Are we looking to achieve similar growth levels? Are we needing to do more than that because our division is coming off a lower base? Are we looking at achieving a level of growth plus profitability? What exactly are the key things that we need to achieve as a sales team to bring to life these key company goals? Typically speaking, I tend to see these max out at about three sales team goals. Occasionally we go to five. I always work in threes and fives in terms of making sure we've got something that's memorable but also easy to digest. But in the end, we invariably end up back at three key sales team goals. From there to build out that strategy, that's when we tend to bring the sales team in. Have a look at all the wonderful things we need to do to bring that to life. Have a look at the risks that can get in the way of that sales strategy coming to life. Start to build out financial targets or even waterfall targets. Look at gross negatives, things that could go wrong in how we're going to achieve those sales strategies. Look at people and how we're going to really maximize and their uplift and then anything else that we might need from a reporting point of view, from a board suite point of view, from a financial levers point of view, from a systems or process point of view. And we really start to build out key action plans as to how we're going to go about achieving these results for the next 12 months. Super important that we get our sales strategy right and now is the time of year to be reviewing it. Either just before or just after Christmas is a really impactful period. If you, if you haven't done so in a while, I'd really encourage you to make that time and go and have a look. On the flip side, if you have recently reviewed your sales strategy again as you move into the first part of next year, when we've been out having fun and doing all things celebrations, please just remind yourself around what you set your goals to be and who was responsible for what so that when you come back, you can continue to build that momentum around your sales strategies. That's number one. Number two is that in every high performing team I see a sales strategy flow really quickly into a sales process. This is not a sales script, but this is a recognizable process that teams can follow again and again and again. It sets the baseline for how we will operate with our customers in a consistent manner, including how we behave, including key metrics, principles and processes that we follow. It talks about the types of sales collateral that we will use. It talks about objection handling. It talks about how we're looking at closing or really bringing price into the equation early. It can bring in things around negotiation principles. Right? The list is endless here when it comes to a sales process, but typically I see it broken down into five key areas. Lead generation, meet and greet and needs analysis, the quoting stage, the closing stage, and number five being the post sale or the key account management stage. Lead generation, meet and greet and needs analysis, quoting closing and the post sale Key account management we have a terrific one pager@strongersalesteams.com sales process we can have a look at building out your own sales process. I've talked a number of times around great sales processes. In fact, if you step Back to episodes one to six all all the way back in 2023, we're nearing 100 episodes now. You'll actually find some terrific information around building out a great sales process. But I really strongly urge any sales leaders as you're moving into the coming 12 months, if you don't have a sales process, now is the time to build one. But even more importantly is get your sales teams in to do it with you. Because teams that build strategies together are far more likely to execute them together. It will also allow you to see those team members that are up for the challenge and those that aren't. All right, so number one was all about building out a sales strategy, number two being a sales process, and number three here, which often gets overlooked, is that we have the appropriate metrics so that we can record progress and also celebration programs for when we achieve some of those goals. So often I see a strategy set up, a sales process run and some metrics to measure, but we forget to celebrate and recognize progress. And after all, once we do things well, when we do them well, doesn't matter how often it is. Everyone likes to hear job well done, everyone likes to be recognized. And I've rarely met a person in this world who doesn't appreciate being made special just for that little moment. So to bring this to life, Metrics. Metrics are a difficult one because many businesses really start to drive heavily into detailed metrics for sales teams, heavy CRM dashboards, and a level of reporting that is just too difficult for sales team members in particular to follow. If our team members can't follow our metrics, it's highly unlikely we're going to get them to provide any valuable input. Which means as leaders, we're on our own to report up to the board or management level or whoever it may be that is recognizing our progress. So for me, it's all about keeping it simple. And the three metrics I really encourage teams to look at are all around what I call a three box model. The three box model measures very much around inputs, or essentially your effort and your energy levels, which is around lead generation. So that's the first piece. The second metric is around the strategy that you have to nurture a pipeline. So getting quotes out and getting people to actually listen to what you have to say. And then the third piece is around the talent to close out those deals and they're your numbers. So we call that the three box model. It was episode 15 when it comes back to the podcast or you can also look@strongersalesteams.com number three box model. You'll see there there's some terrific resources around how you can download them for free to actually look at your metrics. But I call it the three box model. It's very simple. It's three boxes. It's all about lead generation, nurturing and closing. Now, for many businesses, you're going to need to report on a few extra metrics than that. But my strongest advice here is to keep it simple. If your sales teams can buy in to your metric process, you will get that input from them and your life is made invariably easier. So in addition to measuring progress, we're talking about celebrations. I've mentioned that quite recently, in fact, our last podcast. So that was podcast episode 95, our Three Christmas Wishes podcast. We actually dove into how having a formal celebrations program can be so impactful to the performance of your team. If you're unsure around what to do around celebrations, jump back and listen to that podcast. But what's really clear here is that high performing teams know how to celebrate successes. They not only recognize progress, but they celebrate and reward their teams when things are going well. Okay, spent some time on that last week, so I'm not going to spend too much around that. But number one, we're talking about having a sales strategy that's very closely aligned to the company strategy and one that the team can build out action items for. Number two is all around the sales process. So getting really clear on what we need to be doing in a repetitive manner from a systems and process point of view without clipping our ability to shine. And number three was around measuring progress, but also celebrating the wins as they come. Number four is a training program. Every sales team I've ever worked with that succeeds has a Strong training program again, it's something that came out in the Christmas Wishes podcast from last week, so I won't go into too much detail today, but. But setting up a training program that can really impart knowledge onto your team is just so critical. The bit that I often forget to mention though, is just how much I have learned in my journey as a leader from sales teams. During training programs, in sales meetings, I tend to see that the teams just want to follow the format, get things done and get out. Whereas when it comes to training programs, they're more likely to open up a little bit, to provide a little bit of feedback around what's happening out in the market. And for me as a leader, I remember I used to get so many insights into what was happening in our micro environment or the more broader macro environment also that really allowed me to make great decisions, understand where we could improve our offer, but more importantly, where things were going seriously wrong. So a training program is something that I see absolutely evident in every business that's really performing well, and that's generally a mixture of having internal training, external training, and even some resources. Please get in touch if you'd like to know more about this. I have a great format for a training program that's so easy to set up. Moving along to number five. We're on New Year's Day here as we launch this, so we're going to make this nice and punchy for those that are in holiday mode. But number five is all about a coaching program where training is knowledge transfer. Coaching is all about knowledge enhancement and that's taking that information you've learned, the ability to engage with customers and ask good questions, for example, and put it into practice. So great coaches or great leaders who become great coaches are really proficient at taking the knowledge that has been imparted onto their people or their teams and helping them apply it in the real world. It's very easy to be taught how to run, but once you get out there and learn how to run at a pace that you can stay at for a certain period of time, to run on sand, to run up hills, to run on flats, to run without injuring yourself, these are all parts that need lots and lots of coaching and really on the job type of training. So I really encourage leaders out there to think not just about training, but also how you enhance that knowledge that you've trained people on. Really impactful and really important because as we increase the knowledge baselines of our teams, they become less and less reliant on us, which allows us to Focus on more activities such as strategic planning, customer activity and all those things that has lead we really need to be splitting some of our time between. Okay, so there are five areas where I'm seeing high performing teams really succeed on. Number one, they have a strategy and the strategy is paired against the broader business strategy. Number two, a sales process follows on from that strategy. So not only do they set key goals in that strategy, but they've got a consistent progress process that they're going to follow as a team. Number three is all about making sure that they have metrics to recognise and measure progress and also a celebrations program that really acknowledges when their teams are doing well. Number four and five are closely related. Number four being training and number five being coaching. So training is to get the knowledge into people's brains and coaching is about expanding their knowledge as to how they use it in the real world. It's a terrific way to really grow competency in your teams, which then takes some of that load off you as a sales leader to be having to help with every single issue. So there we have it. Five things that I see high performing teams commonly nail from here. My suggestion is you sit down through some quiet time when you're on a break or back in the office, if that's how you prefer to do it, whatever works for you, sit down and actually have a think about how you can bring some of these to life in your team. Because now is very commonly a great time to plan. And if we don't start doing the planning now, we get busy, the year gets away from us and we start to say things like, I'll do it next year, let's get done today, let's not put off what we can do today until tomorrow. And I really encourage everyone to have a good think about that as they're returning to work. Right. So as we finish off today's episode, health and fitness, that little snippet at the end of every episode that I love to talk about, New Year's resolutions. They're coming thick and fast. Every single one of us will happen. It's at this point in time that I try to take a lens around progress over perfection when it comes to things in my life that I'm trying to improve. And I will generally try and do one thing at a time. So I might roll out three things that I want to achieve for the year, but certainly at a personal level, I start with one and I try to build momentum very similar to what we do in the workplace. It's about doing the little things and watching them grow from there. So for me, as I'm going about my New Year's resolutions and I actually haven't decided on what they're going to be yet, but what I'll certainly be aiming to do is build little steps into my progress so that I can find ways to progress rather than aiming for perfection in one go. Because when we progress, a lot of the heartache of doing things and learning and improving can tend to disappear if we just have little milestones along the way. So something to think about. If you have any New Year's resolutions that you'd like to share, please let me know. I'm always happy to provide perspectives, but more than anything, I hope you had a fantastic Christmas, a fantastic New Year's celebration, and still are enjoying some time off. Until next week. Looking forward to Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favorite social media channel. We're stronger sales teams on most of them, and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team. It.