The 2016 Sales Best Practices Study from CSO Insights describes what sets world-class sales organizations.  We’ve provided the top highlights to help support your team’s transformation into a “world class” organization.

Aligning Sales and Marketing
Aligning sales and marketing is not a new idea.  Alignment is really just the beginning of something that is “strategically more important”: ensuring that both functions understand and support the customer’s journey.

Many organizations focus on tactical lead alignment but developing a shared vision of how the organization creates customer value and joint-strategy for delivering that value differentiates world class performances.  For example, 94% of word-class sales performers believe that sales and marketing are aligned with what their customers want and need (vs. 39% of all respondents).

CSO Insights recommends that organizations developing integrated processes leverage “integrated technology from the website to marketing automation to sales enablement to the CRM system. Integration is mandatory to leverage the potential of successful sales and marketing alignment.”

Identifying Why Top Performers are Successful
In the 2015 Sales Management Optimization Study, CSO Insights found that 60% of a company’s revenue are generated by the top 20 percent of the organization’s sales professionals. So, it’s not surprising to learn that 94% of world-class sales performers reported that they know why their top performers are successful (vs. 44% of all respondents).  Firms that are most effective at identifying top performance focus on identifying competencies – not just the tasks the most successful reps are doing, but how they are doing those tasks.

However, understanding insights isn’t enough.  Only about 24% of firms surveyed have a formal process for sharing best practices.  CSO Insights recommends that firms that want to scale and leverage should consider leveraging sales enablement solutions that can support best practice sharing.

Getting New Hires Fully Productive
CSO Insights’ 2016 Sales Performance Optimization Study reports that nearly two-thirds of the firms surveyed are planning to increase the size of their sales force. With turnover rates at nearly 17%, the importance of ramping new hires is even more critical.  According to the Sales Best Practices Study, 82% of world-class sales performers excel at processes to get new hires to full productivity (vs. 22% of all respondents).

These dynamics mean that sales organizations need to move fast to ramp up new hires.  Yet 65% of participants in the 2015 Sales Performance Optimization Study reported that it took 7+ months to get a new hire fully productive, and nearly 29% stated that it required a year or more.

Unfortunately, most organizations under-estimate ramp times – making the jobs of new sale reps even harder and potentially contributing to turnover rates.  CSO Insights recommends that leveraging the latest sales enablement technologies to “provide anytime, anywhere support for new hires.”

Improving Coaching Time and Impact
As we all know, coaching has a measurable impact on sales performance metrics, CSO Insights reports that it can improve win rates for forecasted deals by as much as 9%.  At the same time, the 2015 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, 45% of respondents reported that coaching is left up to the managers.

World class sales organizations recognize the value of coaching, with 88% reporting that their sales manager, in an average month, “definitely” spends “adequate time” coaching every person on the sales team (vs. 32% of all respondents).  Coaching becomes a virtuous cycle – the better sales managers become at coaching, the less coaching time is needed to be effective.

Leveraging Sales Analytics
New to this year’s study is the importance of using sales analytics to measure and predict sales performance, with 94% of word-class sales performers reporting the use of sales analytics.  Using sales analytics in conjunction with CRM provides Sales Leaders with granular indicators for each opportunity and early warnings if the deal is starting to go off track.  Based on its research, CSO Insights suggests in its 2016 Sales Best Practices Study that sales organizations looking to achieve more “predictable sales performance” take these steps:

1. Document their sales process.
2. Fully integrate their sales process into their core CRM systems.
3. Overlay a sales analysis system on top of their CRM and track alerts about potential deal derailment
4. Use metrics generated from sales analytics to create individual coaching plans for every rep

Again, these are only a few select highlights from the 2016 Sales Best Practices Study. We encourage you to check out the full report from CSO Insights, which you can download here.