9 Priorities for Sales Leaders Now

It isn’t easy to lead a sales force in the best of times, and it is more difficult in a recessionary environment. As a sales leader, you need to establish priorities. The following outlines these in order of importance.

Priority One: Sales Effectiveness

A sales leader’s top priority should always be the effectiveness of their sales force. You can measure effectiveness by looking at your overall win rate. The greater your win rate, the better your results. The lower your win rate, the less likely you are to hit your targets.

Many sales leaders fail to achieve their sales goals because they believe that their team needs more opportunities rather than greater effectiveness. This gets selling backward. First, you improve your ability to win deals and then you scale up the approach. Pursuing a huge number of opportunities you can’t win is a poor strategy.

Priority Two: Develop Your Sales Force

The one path to sales effectiveness is development. That means training and coaching each member of your sales team. This is true for your best sales reps and the salespeople who need more attention to succeed in B2B sales.

Many leaders provide a single training once a year, normally at the Sales Kick-Off meeting. Leaders using this approach will need 12 years to help their team gain the 12 major skills they need to be effective. That’s quite a long time to build sales effectiveness.

Priority Three: A Positive Culture

My experience in staffing has taught me that the better and more positive the culture, the better the results. Since June of 2021, no less than four million people have quit their jobs every month. This amount of churn can make it difficult for you to get the results you need.

A positive culture reduces turnover. In a stressful, uncertain environment, a positive culture helps your team recognize that it’s better to be with your company than someplace else. Everything else follows from the culture the leaders maintain.

See: 11 Elements of Successful Sale Culture

Priority Four: Engagement and Commitment

Sales roles come with a high level of autonomy, so sales leaders impose discipline and accountability on their teams. While many of them aim for compliance, engagement and commitment are much more valuable.

The engagement you and your team share leads to the high standards that support commitment. In all things leadership, the leader must go first. Start by increasing your engagement with your team and work from there.

Priority Five: Winning New Clients

The priorities discussed to this point will make it much easier for you to lead your team to win the new clients and the net new revenue you need to grow. It isn’t easy to win deals, especially enterprise-level deals, in the best of times, which is why you must prioritize effectiveness.

You are responsible for how your sales force sells. You will need to impose a sales methodology that creates the right value for your prospective clients. This is your right and your obligation.

Priority Six: Retaining Existing Clients

This priority doesn’t always get the attention it needs, and it is likely an organizational priority. Customer churn will make it difficult for you to reach your goals because you must replace the revenue you lose before you can gain net new revenue. Over the past few years, many sales organizations have started using more customer success roles as a strategy to retain existing clients.

If you want growth, spend time to understand why your clients leave and how you can retain them.

Priority Seven: Growing Existing Clients

You are not going to grow your existing clients if you can’t retain them. But one way to retain your existing clients and keep your competitors from poaching them is to continually create new value.

The strategy here is to land and expand, providing ideas and initiatives that improve the client’s results. By continually providing new value, you create new opportunities within your existing clients.

Priority Eight: Creating More Opportunities

I believe most sales leaders and sales managers would have this priority in the number-one position. The problem with pursuing more opportunities to reach your goal is that you only get to count the revenue of the deals your team wins.

With a high win rate and sales effectiveness, you can scale up the number of opportunities, not because you need greater coverage, but because you can win more of the deals your team creates.

Priority Nine: Get Clean

What can you remove that will help you improve your results? Have you created too many priorities for your team, confusing them about what’s important? Has your sales tech grown so large that it takes too much time and effort to use all the tools?

Whenever you have the chance, remove things that do not contribute to your priorities. There’s no reason to keep things simply because you used them in the past.