Most importantly, the best of the best to everyone for what I believe will be an extraordinary growth year in 2024! My personal chant driving my own planning is "Do More in '24!".
"Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2024"
As to New Year's Resolutions, I'm not big on "wishing" or even "hoping", and while I did do a bit of both on my $20 bet on last Sunday's Powerball, I also knew that:
- I had zero in the way of any plan.
- What I did was all emotion and total hoping and wishing about the result.
- To make it worse, I let the machine pick the numbers.
- It was a 1/300 million bet, and not surprisingly, none of my 10 numbers came even close.
Here we are positioned at the end of the first week of what should be a very good year. From our perspective of our own customers, 2023 was a very positive growth year. Certainly a few speed bumps, but in our assessment of the outlook at this time last January, we downplayed (for technical reasons of labor supply) all the media hype and naysayers who were forecasting a recession. Our voice back then-and again now-is that this will be a year of steady measured quarterly growth for those companies making small productivity investments in the science of their sales and marketing planning. .
Why am i so certain?
It's the huge opportunity based on the still mediocre 2023 metrics for B2B salespeople taken as a whole:
- Salespeople only spend 2 hours a day actually directly selling.
- They spend 1 hour a day on pure administrative tasks.
- They spend 7 hours a week creating their own marketing materials, and do a terrible job at it!
- 28% of salespeople say their sales process takes too long, and they lose prospects as a result.
- The average sales win rate is only 21%!
- 45% of salespeople are overwhelmed with technology because of poor training.
With results like this, jumping into 2024 without a definitive formal sales plan is the same as playing Powerball where everything is based on wishing and make believe forecasts that have no substance other than hope.
Take Control in '24!
-Replace hope with a formal sales process with 5 or 6 steps!
-At each step, use specific tools like templates, playbooks and bots!
-Commit to an easy-to-use CRM like Hubspot!
Just from these simple changes, there should be an increase in productivity of 20% a year in about six months, and that's without formalizing the process of how we hire, onboard and train our salespeople which represents the second largest opportunity for productivity improvement.
And all of this then becomes a baseline before considering the results that are coming into play right now from the use of generative AI tools in both Marketing and in Sales.2024 will be a year of implementation, not just discussion, and I've seen that already occurring with my students at Tufts.
now's the perfect time to launch your 2024 Sales Plan!
"Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2024"
What I did over the holiday break is finish updating our three free eBooks on Business Planning, on Sales Planning and on Marketing Planning. It was a very interesting experience to see how much has changed in just 12 months.
You can click here for this brand new "Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2024", for a few ideas on structure, sales models, process, a number of productivity tools and how to hire.
Have a great weekend enjoying the snow. I'm a Tufts this AM taking a few of my students to a PE event sponsored by ACGBoston, and then off to VT.
Connect with me with any questions or your own ideas about improving sales productivity in 2024.
Always love talking to salespeople!
www.derbymanagement.com
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.
