Highspot Blog

Sales leaders are constantly focused on attaining revenue goals, which naturally shifts the bulk of their attention to top performers. After all, they’re the breadwinners who consistently achieve quota and drive revenue. The general perception is that keeping top performers successful will increase everyone else’s performance as they try to keep up.

This is flawed thinking. Core performers, or “B reps,” are a company’s most valuable asset. How is that possible? Get familiar with the 20-60-20 theory. This approach of grouping sellers finds that 20% of a sales team are top performers, 20% are struggling, and the other 60% are somewhere in the middle.

Research done by the Sales Executive Council found that a 5% increase from the middle 60% of performers yielded 80% more revenue than a 5% increase from just the top 10%. If sales leaders want to increase quota attainment and optimize pipeline generation, they have to start by improving the effectiveness of their core sellers.

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How do you guide your sales team to achieve better results? The answer lies in using the right tools and strategies to improve sales productivity.

On an intuitive level, most team leaders and managers understand that the more buyers your team can engage (within a given period of time), the more deals they’ll close for your company. It’s simple enough: if your team used to reach out to 10 buyers per hour in the past, and they now reach out to 20 buyers per hour, assuming that their closing rate remains the same, you’ll get 2x the amount of successful deals.

There are various ways you can go about boosting sales productivity (for instance: setting up training sessions and getting your reps to read the best books on sales), but the most effective thing you can do is invest in a sales productivity tool or sales effectiveness tool for your team.

In this article, we walk you through the different categories of sales productivity tools that can turn your team into a lean, mean, revenue-generating machine.

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Seventy-six percent of The Extremely Productive (The XP) hold themselves accountable for doing what they tell themselves they’re going to do. Only 34% of The Rest hold themselves to this same level of accountability.

In RAIN Group’s new Extreme Productivity Benchmark Report, which includes data from 2,377 respondents, “holding yourself accountable” was the top behavior exhibited by The XP. It was also the No. 1 key driver of Extreme Productivity, and the behavior that represented the biggest difference between The XP and The Rest.

The data is clear: No matter if you’re in sales, marketing, or another field, the importance of holding yourself accountable can’t be understated. If you can master this, you’ll stay focused and achieve greater success.

Here are three ways to improve self-accountability.

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Since Jinan Liu’s Fine Needle Shop created the first printed ad in 10th-century China, sellers and marketers have been working together to close deals and grow businesses.

Today, the relationship between sales and marketing is complicated. Ensuring that these two groups work together is vital to business growth. And while there are barriers to alignment, the process of uniting these traditionally independent teams around a shared set of goals is foundational to success in our digital economy.  Modern alignment is a truly interactive process — not a final destination — that requires executive buy-in, shared goals, platforms, and processes to support collaborative initiatives.

However, when only 8% of marketing and sales teams say that they are tightly aligned, achieving this is often easier said than done.

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Plutarch, famed philosopher of Ancient Greece, was an expert critic. He had something to say about the study of poetry, friendship, ideal dinner conversation — pretty much everything. Among his most useful critiques, Plutarch offered his contemporaries a takedown of education, and specifically the way things are taught.

Plutarch believed lectures and other one-way knowledge transfers didn’t provide the emotional, inspirational context students needed to perform. In fact, he’s frequently quoted as saying, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

Eons later, Plutarch’s critique remains incredibly relevant, particularly for sales training. The legacy methods that most businesses rely on don’t give working modern reps the learning environment they need to succeed.

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It’s a whole new world for sellers and marketers. With the dawn of the digital era and the evolution of buyers, forward-thinking companies are transforming their approach to engaging customers — a transformation that begins with analysis and anticipation.

Reflecting back on a successful past first requires looking forward. Agile companies pivot their approaches based on current trends and educated predictions that will shape the business landscape. Many of these trends will be shared at TOPO Summit 2019, where 2,000 leaders (Highspot included!) will come together to discuss critical topics in revenue.

With the conference around the corner, we dove into three of today’s — and tomorrow’s — hottest topics that are impacting the modern market.

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For our first Highspot Market Pulse survey, we chose to explore the state of sales and marketing alignment within the rapidly growing life sciences industry. According to KPMG, global annual sales for the medical device industry alone will reach nearly $800 billion by 2030. Our research found that there is a clear opportunity in life sciences for process improvement between sales and marketing teams.

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Picture this: You plod into a conference center expecting endless slides and nap-worthy sessions. Instead, you’re met with Journey bumping through the speakers, a breakfast buffet, and colleagues who have either had unhealthy amounts of coffee, or who are genuinely pumped to be at your company’s yearly sales kickoff (SKO) — or both!

This was the scene at Highspot Momentum 2019 — our excuse to spend two days celebrating (and analyzing) our collective wins, learning from customers including Apptio, SAP Concur, and PitchBook, and getting energized about the year ahead. Our goal was straight-forward: create an SKO experience this year that will still be the gold standard five years from now.

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What Is Buyer Engagement?

Buyer engagement describes the interactions between buyers and sales reps. Some examples of buyer engagement include opening an email, watching a video, reading content provided by a rep, and answering a rep’s phone call. The more meaningful the interaction, the more likely a buyer is to work with a rep.

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Effective sales strategies are developed through careful evaluation and constant improvement. At Highspot, we work with sales and marketing leaders every day to enable their success, so we know firsthand the importance of a strong sales strategy.

Below, we’ve answered the most frequently asked questions about developing a winning sales strategy.

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