APPENDIX

Your Revenue Roadmap: A Powerful Left-Brained Approach for Connecting the Sales Effectiveness Disciplines

THROUGH THE INNOVATIVE SALE, we’ve concentrated on unleashing your sales team’s creativity to develop more effective sales strategies and customer solutions. However, a right-brained creative process operates together with left-brained sales strategies, sales processes, and sales tactics. We’ve combined several of these left-brained sales approaches with the Innovative Sale including value proposition, sales process, and coaching.

As we’ve worked with hundreds of sales organizations over the years, we defined a bigger framework, the “Revenue Roadmap,” that describes the areas in which successful sales organizations tend to perform well. The Revenue Roadmap identifies four major layers, or competency areas, and sixteen related disciplines that must connect for the organization to grow profitably, as identified in Figure A-1.

FIGURE A-1. THE REVENUE ROADMAP.

Insight

The first layer of the Revenue Roadmap, “insight,” pertains to understanding the market, the competition, and how the business is performing. Insight is the highest-level competency: understanding the voice of the customer, the macro market, competitor moves, and the performance of the business. That insight will drive certain decisions to the next downstream level, which is sales strategy.

Listening to the voice of the customer is a critical starting point. Sales leaders must understand the needs and expectations of their customers and their performance relative to those expectations. That insight allows leaders to see any gaps and determine where they can improve value proposition, sales coverage, and sales process.

Sales leaders also need to consider what’s going on in the macro market environment, especially as it relates to their industry. Certain shifts in the economic environment can, over the long term, drive decisions about the sales strategy and how they might plan for where the market is going, as opposed to where they are right now.

It’s essential to know how competitors are performing from a growth and financial perspective. Sales leaders also have to understand their competitors’ offers to the market and how they are positioning their products and services.

Finally, sales leaders should look at the company’s historic and projected revenue and profit performance. This evaluation should consider whether growth has come through the retention of current customer revenue, the penetration of customers through increased usage or additional products, or the acquisition of new customers. By understanding the business performance they can see where they’ve been strong and where they’ve been weak, and they can adjust their sales strategy accordingly.

Sales Strategy

The second layer, “sales strategy,” defines the sales organization’s action plan to achieve its goal. The sales strategy will drive decisions concerning product and service focus, concentration on certain markets, value propositions, and the resulting approach to market.

First and foremost to the strategy, it’s critical to define the core and strategic products and services the business provides. In many companies these are developed based on the needs of certain customer segments. Too often, however, products or services are internally driven and may not align naturally with customer needs, requiring a significant change in the offer or value proposition.

The organization determines how it will organize and prioritize customers and prospects through its segmentation and targeting. The most effective segmentation and targeting consider characteristics such as customer industry, sales potential, profitability, common needs, and overall fit with the sales organization’s business.

It’s important that segmentation and targeting flow into a plan that’s actionable by the sales organization. Simply defining the segment at a high level is not going to answer the sales rep’s question, “Who do I go see on Monday morning?”

The value proposition goes beyond what the sales organization communicates to customers and articulates the organization’s understanding of the customer’s business and issues, what the organization can accomplish for the customer, and how the organization differentiates itself from the competition. The highest-level value proposition is usually communicated at a company level. To be effective for sales, however, the organization must convert its value proposition to sales messages that can be communicated at the segment level, customer level, and deal level to adapt to changing situations and customer needs.

When developing the approach to market, sales leaders should incorporate decisions about product, service, target segments, value propositions, and potential sales resources into a plan that can be executed by the sales organization. The customer coverage layer converts that plan into action.

Customer Coverage

“Customer coverage,” the third layer, defines how the organization will use its channels, roles, processes, and resources to go to market.

Sales channels outline the overall routes to market, whether they’re third-party companies such as resellers, referral partners, and retailers; or whether they’re part of the company sales force, which could include a range of sales jobs. Sales leaders need to base the selection of their sales channel mix on factors like how the customer prefers to buy, how channel partners might improve the overall product offer, their ability to reach customers in different markets, and the financial efficiency of using lower-cost channels to reach certain customers or conduct certain types of sales or service transactions.

Within sales roles and structure, sales leaders must consider the types of sales and support jobs they’re going to use and how the organization is structured around those jobs. Sales jobs typically will align to customer segments and can range from global account management to field sales to inside sales. The structure may be developed around key segments, for example, the telecommunications industry or major accounts. It may also be defined around certain geographies, functional roles, or some combination.

Sales channels and sales roles integrate with the processes for working with customers. In fact, the best customer coverage models are built from the customer’s buying process with a sales process and roles that reflect how the customer prefers to work. Sales processes lay out the common approaches for how the sales team identifies prospects, qualifies opportunities, develops solutions, manages the momentum, closes the sale, and implements the product or service for the customer. While sales processes vary widely even within a single sales organization, it’s important to define the optimal or preferred sales process as a foundational point for the organization to manage and optimize performance.

Sales deployment maps the feet on the street and the level of sales resources needed for each of the sales roles by geographies, segments, or other forms of account assignment. Deployment is typically guided by a combination of sales capacity (available sales time and workload) to manage current accounts or sell to new accounts, sales role and customer alignments, and logistical factors like geography and travel patterns.

Enablement

“Enablement,” the final layer of the Revenue Roadmap, supports all of the upstream disciplines within insight, sales strategy, and customer coverage. Enablement includes areas such as incentive compensation and quotas, which aligns sellers to the sales strategy. It includes recruiting and retention, which define the current inventory of talent and determine how the organization is going to attract and retain the right talent for the long term. Training and development builds the capabilities of the organization for people currently in their jobs and in junior roles that will progress into key sales roles. Tools and technology provide leverage by enhancing the effectiveness of gaining insight and implementing the organization’s decisions around sales strategy, customer coverage, and enablement.

The Revenue Roadmap helps a company to align its strengths and ensure everyone is firing on all cylinders. While it begins with insight, all sixteen disciplines are connected, and the decisions and actions flow from one to the next. When looking at any sales discipline, it helps to know where it fits within the overall framework, whether upstream or downstream from related disciplines. That’s why issues in the upstream disciplines, like a sales process or sales roles that are not well defined, will show up as symptoms in downstream disciplines (like a training or coaching program not having the desired impact due to the undefined sales process or sales roles that it is supposed to support). These are the kinds of inconsistencies to look for as the upstream and downstream alignments shift. We see this situation play out over and over in different industries: from technology to manufacturing to business services. Where the business evolves, sales evolve as well, and each sales discipline must evolve to support that change.

As it pertains to innovation in sales strategy and customer solutions, you can apply the Revenue Roadmap as a powerful left-brained tool to complement your right-brained creative problem solving. The Revenue Roadmap can help you move toward a good technically correct solution. However, the Innovative Sale can magnify your impact and ability to develop new, differentiated solutions when aligned to each of the Revenue Roadmap disciplines.