Operationalizing the Four Dimensions of B2B Sales Growth
What McKinsey research recommends:
- Centralizing analytics and focus on granular deal and account-level use cases accelerates data-driven decision making
- Enabling cross-functional collaboration and frequent account re-prioritization drives agility
- Structured incentivized coaching cadence and personalized learning programs create the talent edge
- Focusing on digital tools adoption and investing in granular capabilities widens the gap between leaders and the rest
What sales leaders are thinking:
- Getting data ready for analytics and driving analytics adoption is challenging
- Improving data fluency and reducing time spent on analysis has room for improvement
- Asynchronous communication (Slack, Teams) is helping balance frequent reviews with selling time
- Combining CRM + Analytics + Collaboration could help in growing sales in this remote era
A. What are the Four Dimensions?
Recently, an article on driving sales growth by McKinsey was shared in some sales leadership forums. Based on a global survey of 2,500 B2B companies, it reemphasized the four dimensions of next-generation sales growth — insights, agility, talent, and technology — that drive 5–10% higher sales and 10–20% higher productivity.
B. Learnings from Outperformers
1. Insights
- Treat data and analytics as strategic assets, invest in building foundational skills and scale insights by centralizing analytics
- Move beyond table stakes like sales planning to more granular use cases at deal and account level opportunities
2. Agility
- Drive cross-functional coordination to help customers find best-fit solutions
- More frequent coverage reviews — enabled by analytics — to assign resources toward the highest-value opportunities
3. Talent
- Commit to weekly coaching cadence and align structures and incentives that make it possible
- Adapt team learning programs continuously and tailor learning based on observed strengths at individual seller level
4. Technology
- Emphasize digital tool investments but also place equal focus on tool adoption
- Invest more on granular use cases like predictive analytics, pricing, deal scoring
Effectively leveraging these four dimensions is what separates fast growers from slow movers.
C. How to Operationalize the Four Dimensions
The statistically-backed McKinsey findings make absolute sense but like any good survey, it also opens up more questions:
- what does it mean for an organization that is not a slow grower but not an outperformer either
- what are the challenges and enablers for adopting the four dimensions for sales growth
And when a group of friends in sales leadership roles got together on a Zoom call last weekend, many more questions, practices and ideas emerged:
- Sales leaders have a difficult balance between being data-informed (data + judgment) and being data-driven (data alone)
- Intersection of Insights with the other three dimensions create challenges and opportunities
1. Insights x Technology
Getting the Data Ready for Analytics
Sellers typically use 6+ applications besides CRM, each generating more and more data. On the other hand, foundational challenges of data definition persist. Getting everyone to use the same data sources and speak the same data language is difficult.
Driving Analytics Adoption
General Electric old-timers will remember the formula for driving change: Q x A = E (Quality of the Solution x Acceptance = Effectiveness), however, it is easier said than done.
When it comes to analytics — acceptance is closely linked to comprehension — if sellers and managers do not understand the analytics, any action taken may be weak or worse misdirected.
While sales ops function can act as ‘analytics to business’ translator for sellers, smaller team size does pose limits to scale. Whether AI NLG NLQ investments by technology providers solve this problem is an open question in 2021.
Finally it also boils down to time available and intent — sales quota pressure also often means focus on execution data — not enough time for strategic usage of analytics.
2. Insights x Talent
Improving Transparency and Data Fluency
Transparency is easy — give sellers access to the same metrics that managers use and provide visibility to team metrics and KPIs. But data fluency is difficult as analytics to run the business often gets confused with the quest for aha moments.
How Amazon runs its business reviews can provide some inspiration (quoting from the recent book Working Backwards) — “the deck is organized with the exact same metrics as the previous week, in the exact same format, using the exact same fonts, with the exact same symbols, in the exact same order.”
And for a sales process — there can be a model for the business (product, service, SaaS) which drives the measurement (metrics, KPIs) and powers the management. When repeated, this may create a virtuous cycle — improve data fluency, help analytics adoption and drive outcomes.
Doing More Coaching and Less Analyses
More data leads to more reports and dashboards and managers end up spending more time on analysis than on performance management and coaching. Since maximum leverage comes from the larger middle 50% base of sellers, this analysis time has an adverse multiplier effect for a manager and leads to poor coaching quality. Automating seller-level analytics may help managers earn back time to spend on individually tailored coaching.
Establishing coaching cadence is easiest done on manager-seller Slack/Teams channels — discuss coaching levers (the science and the art of selling), document actions and goals and repeat the cycle next week or fortnight. Joint accountability and ease of finding coaching history become welcome side benefits with collaboration apps.
3. Insights x Agility
Enabling Deal Collaboration across Functions
Data engineering and analytics at granular levels — deal, account, product, industry — has a lot of room for improvement. Often, sales teams end up extracting data and analyzing on spreadsheets.
For those using collaboration apps, basic analytics triggers into Slack and Teams channels are also gaining traction.
Balancing Frequent Reviews with Selling Time
Maximizing selling time has always been the focus for sales leaders and while frequent review meetings have value, they may eat into selling time. A hybrid approach of synchronous calls with asynchronous engagement in Slack and Teams channels can offer a balance.
The common theme that emerged from the discussion was that CRM + Analytics + Collaboration Apps seems foundational for next-generation sales growth. How much impact it will have is probably a topic for another research survey.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
