"Spring is nature's way of saying, 'let's party'" -Robin Williams

Teaching in my Science of Sales course last Thursday afternoon, only hours before the official start of Spring Break was in a word, "interesting", but with the help of visiting instructor and prior student, Erica Veino, senior Account Exec at BitSight, we worked through the fundamentals of her sales process.  For me, nothing is better than bringing back to Tufts alums from my courses who are now experienced sales professionals to teach exacting details in terms of process steps, sales tools, and sales models.  The mastery of those details experienced the prior week from alums Frank Yandrisevits and Shannon du Pont transitioned concepts into the practicality of how to model, train, manage and compensate salespeople.  

Of course, as last week's class was winding down, I did emphasize two critical points as visions of warm beaches and fun times lay only hours ahead: 

1. First and most importantly: Be safe!!!

2. For the seniors, I did point out that the next time they would experience "Spring Break" would be at the age of 35 when they would packing up their own kids to trek to Disneyland.  

Q2 is the most important quarter of any business!

Jon Sobo, one of my many gifted sales alums from Hubspot brings art and science together as an instructor in my course.  We've also had the hands-on experience and detailed practical wisdom of both senior Hubspot managers, Brian Bresee and James Stone, who have instructed this semester.  

Too often inexperienced salespeople or even managers work through the sales year focused on Q4, typically the largest and seemingly the most critical quarter of the year, with all eyes on the prize of punching above quota and heading to president's club for all the hard work of the prior 12 months.  In practice, for that success to occur, it's the tune up, the practiced refinements and the adjustments made at the very beginning of Q2 that set the Q1 experiments, successes and failures into the reality of definitive sales plans for the balance of the year.  For that to happen, no matter what the size or the model is of your salesforce, here are a few proven practices that will ensure success:  

1.  Study the analytics, measurements and results of everything from Q1. Understand exactly what worked and didn't work from marketing's lead gen choices down to the KPIs of MQLs and SQLs.  Apply that same rigor to measuring the step metrics of your sales funnel, the frequency of use of various sales tools and playbooks and grade the level of sales and technical training on the team. Provide all of this data to everyone on the sales and marketing teams to assess, ask questions about and thoroughly digest.

2.  Take the team offsite for an afternoon, a night and the next day.  Spend the afternoon sifting through the data, understanding objectively the successes, the failures and the adjustments that need to made...detail by detail.  Have a team dinner together that night focused on bonding, fun and a couple of awards.  

3. Work through detailed quarterly plans the next day.  Begin with overviewing the total company's committed sales plan and depending on the size of the business, break out to create either individual or team quarter by quarter plans for the balance of the year.  Have those plans presented to the rest of the team during the balance of the day.   Make adaptations right there in real time and lock down 100% commitments.   

Sound too formal or too expensive?  Ask yourself, what's your cost of failure?

2023 Sales PLANNING-none of us can control Results!