Sales Optimisation

What's the challenge?

Building an effective sales team takes persistence, tenacity and skill. In a post pandemic world, a large majority of organisations have come to rely hugely on digital ways of working.

Zoom, Teams and Hangouts are the new currency of engagement for selling teams, both with colleagues and with customers and has been a lifeline for sales teams during these challenging times.

But, the underlying facts have not changed, sales is about the rep and their understanding of how they solve a pain point for a customer, and how well they can position your offering to achieve that. Digital sales force effectiveness is about the mindset of the people within your organisation and getting the right combination of skills, trust, attitude and understanding to maximise their impact on key KPIs. Only now there are fewer visible cues to competence and confidence.

Cognisco benchmarks show that in excess of 30% of any workforce has been misinformed, misunderstands or misinterprets information, guidelines or codes of conduct while being 100% confident they are acting correctly.

Why is this complicated?

Your salespeople each have their number to hit. Sales leaders need a measurement framework that gives them confidence in forecasts to enable them to continue to be effective. Every new hire is an overhead and a risk, reducing the time to revenue is critical for in year success. A world of heightened buyer uncertainty has lead to changing priorities, conservative decision making and decreased seller engagement. Face-to-face activity is returning in some instances, but it isn't back to how it was and may never be. The result of this is that the customer's buying process has changed dramatically and is still in a
state of flux.

Organisations have discovered different ways of doing conventional things and found unexpected efficiencies both in time and resources, there is no going back. Added to this, your salespeople have less visibility and proximity to the customer, less face time and are therefore exposed to more risk of failing to meet targets. So how can your sales organisation deliver predictable revenue in this increasingly challenging sales environment, given this was a hard task before? How can you help your salespeople respond? Salespeople are easy to recruit and expensive when they fail. The competency of the sales team and their ability to both forecast and deliver has to be an absolute priority for every organisation today.

Do your metrics look like this?

Poor Metrics

What happens if I ignore this?

Many a sales leader has experience of scenarios where sales KPIs were all favourable but the outcomes were not. Forecast accuracy is the holy grail, managing metrics around getting the right cadence of face to face customer meetings per week, ensuring teams are focused on pipeline generation, establishing that teams have three times cover, checking in repeatedly on upside and committed revenue to absolutely ensure there is no last minute slippage. Even with this level of rigour, the sales forecast is missed time and time again.

So, how do sales organisations move from crisis response selling to improved virtual selling in a new buying environment?
How will you enhance your team's virtual selling capabilities to actually impact accuracy of the revenue forecast?
How can you maximise your sales team's effectiveness, in this new selling environment?

Download our Sales Forecast report

Being a Sales Leader is tough. Hitting your number just got a whole lot less predictable.

Cognisco’s SaaS platform maximises your understanding of the capability and confidence of your sales team, to enable action and to drive results.

Download now for free

Knowing precisely where to focus your efforts and expertise to gain the maximum return is a dark art.

Here at Cognisco we help organisations make data driven decisions about their people. We evidence capability, knowledge, understanding and likely behaviour in order to identify talent, improve business performance and minimise organisational risk. We help to maximise the impact of your key team members, to identify those who have potential and identify who needs guidance. Our benchmarks show that in excess of 30% of any workforce has been misinformed, misunderstands or misinterprets information, guidelines or codes of conduct while being 100% confident they are acting correctly. Having real-time, granular insight about how you can achieve in year/in quarter gains is the difference between winning and losing.

What action should I take?

Cognisco provides real-world scenario based assessments and dashboards to evidence the judgement and decision making capability of your people. This enables sales leaders to intervene to identify and validate your top performers, understand your mid-tier performers who lack confidence but warrant investment and mentoring and to isolate where weakness exists in the team. We focus on each sales professionals' specific needs. We identify which parts of the sales process can be improved, and shift the mindset of your teams. What gets measured, gets managed, so let our assessments and dashboard help you ensure that your salespeople are reinforcing the right behaviours. We can help you to guide your organisation through the ever-changing sales environment and make the right decisions with confidence. Organisations that take this seriously talk to Cognisco.

What do the benefits look like?

Our platform uses a series of custom scenarios that identify the skill and mindset of your team members in key areas of risk. With this you can help make decisions with confidence to maximise your return and help you achieve the 5-10% uplift you need to hit your number. It can also give you the confidence and peace of mind when hiring a new salesperson or training your top talent. It augments your clarity, visibility and levels of trust, progressively refining teams to help them deliver on their forecasts. This aligns with the mindset of the CFO that forecastability of revenue is a hugely important factor in maintaining shareholder confidence in any modern organisation. This culminates in the development of a culture of excellence that encourages high performers and drives organisational success driven and underpinned by Cognisco.

Cognisco helps your organisation make decisions with confidence to maximise your return and help you achieve the 5-10% uplift you need to hit your number.