How to crank up a stalled sales engine.
Sometimes the odds are not in your favor, and a series of
knocks stalls your sales engine. Now, you have a cold-start
problem, which takes a lot more effort to get going.
The client is a $700 m global engineering services company
that ran into rough weather at their largest accounts (see
Blindsided by Relationship Gaps) and were now looking to
rebuild their sales engine and regain their confidence.
As the team was rebuilt, the operations clock needed to start
ticking again. The company had previously been a federated
structure of independent account teams. This means that
“bring-your-own-data” was the norm for board meetings, and
strategy was stalling at the door of data. The data was
created and managed in custom spreadsheets by a thirty-strong
sales operations team in India. The management spent an
inordinate amount of time gathering data for board meetings
and, conversely, spent no time using this low-trust data for
decision-making. The sales team’s operations were chaotic,
overworked, and under-optimized. Spreadsheets cause these
problems.
Doloop Digital worked with the client on a multi-prong
transformation drive. To restart their sales operations clock,
we convinced the clients that their long-operating CRM was a
dysfunctional case of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). Just as
the man who chases two rabbits catches none, a company that
demands both spreadsheets and system reports will only have
one method updated. The system was updated with all the latest
spreadsheet data, and the spreadsheet models were deleted. All
reports now had to be zero-touch from the systems directly.
Then we started a series of reviews and silent reporting that
allowed sunlight to fall upon the data, automatically
improving data and decision quality.
From taking six weeks and thirty people to run a quarterly
reporting cycle, the company has moved to a steady sales
operations clock where the data flows without friction, and
the leadership can make real-time decisions based on numbers
they can trust.
When you’re facing execution friction in your revenue engine,
consider the following steps:
Further learning. Contact us for Gaurav Rastogi’s “Understanding the Enterprise Revenue Growth Engine” workshop. Please know that we will only fully support a transformation program that the leadership team is committed to executing. It will take at least nine months to show results, but they will be long-lasting.