How do you make 2023 your most successful sales year ever? By investing in the right people, processes, and technologies for account and sales planning! That helps you identify important details about prospects and existing customers so you can move them through your pipelines in the months ahead. By following the tips below, you could enhance value-driven relationships and maximize revenue potential by the end of the year. You’ll also learn how Next Quarter can enhance account planning workflows in 2023 and beyond.
Have the Right People in Place
The right people are paramount to account and sales planning success. As a sales leader, you need to surround yourself with a positive, hard-working, and seriously talented team that can help you identify key accounts and synchronize all your sales and marketing efforts. Your team might consist of the following:
BDRs
Business development representatives (BDRs) identify prospects, reach out to these potential customers, and schedule appointments.
SDRs
Sales development representatives (SDRs) qualify leads at the start of the sales pipeline, helping you find the most lucrative customers to convert.
Inbound/outbound sales representatives
Inbound sales reps handle incoming calls and emails from potential and existing customers. Outbound reps promote your product or service through cold calling, email marketing, and social selling. Both roles are critical for sales success.
Account executives
Account executives manage new and existing accounts, negotiate contracts, and close deals.
You will also need to work closely with people outside your account planning team. Those people include the CFO and CRO in your organization, the finance department, and those responsible for revenue intelligence. Developing closer relationships with these employees will provide you with insights and financial resources to uncover buyer needs and pain points and successfully close your account and sales planning funnels.
Build Your Account Planning Process
Creating an effective account and sales planning workflow will let you collect information about prospects and existing customers and grow key accounts. Start by determining which accounts to focus your energy on. These accounts are usually business clients interested in your products and services with a high profile and the financial resources to invest in your company. The right account planning tools will identify the most valuable accounts in your pipelines without the heavy lifting. (More on this later.)
Next, use account planning best practices to determine how reps will research accounts and gather information. Decide what KPIs to use for account and sales planning campaigns and which team members will nurture and engage with accounts. Chronicling this process will ensure all reps are on the same page, resulting in fewer missed sales opportunities.
Also, decide on your long-term account and sales planning goals for the year. Is your intention to generate as much revenue by a specific date in the next 12 months? Do you want to retain customers? Convert prospects?
Prepare Your Team for the Year Ahead
It’s going to be a busy 12 months for your team. Prepare them for future success by identifying the challenges they experienced last year, such as prospecting ineffective leads or trying to close deals too quickly. You might want to invest in training for your team if you have the budget and resources. If not, junior team members will benefit from shadowing sales leaders and learning about the most effective sales strategies for different scenarios.
If communicating the correct information to prospects and existing customers is a challenge for SDRs and BDRs, you could use sales scripts to help train the team. That will help reps convey the right details about your products and services to people over the phone and via email. Scripts will also help you comply with any data governance legislation in your industry or jurisdiction and ensure reps handle personally identifiable information with sensitivity.
Defining specific parameters for team members as you grow your business is critical. Ask yourself these questions: Will BDRs need to convert a certain number of prospects every month? Who will SDRs report to in your team? Will you hire a BDR manager?
Finally, you must measure the performance of your team as the year progresses. The latest analytical tools will identify the most valuable team members and those that require additional resources or training. For example, you can delegate top-performing BDRs to your most lucrative key accounts and use more inexperienced reps for simple prospecting tasks.
Invest in Technologies That Support Your Processes and People
Once you have assembled a team, laid down your account and sales planning process, and prepared your team, it’s time to look for technologies that help identify priority accounts.
Salesforce is a great CRM (customer relationship management) software for collecting information from prospects and existing customers. Reps can use this CRM to create individual customer records and learn more about the people they will be engaging with and nurturing over the next 12 months.
You can’t stop here, though. Salesforce is a great start, but you need other solutions to uncover account growth, accelerate their pipeline, and provide data-driven insights to forecast with confidence.
The Next Quarter Platform
Next Quarter empowers companies to grow revenue through data. Our account growth and forecasting platform helps companies drive growth and predictable forecasts through account planning, sales methodologies, data-driven forecasts, and conversational AI. Next Quarter is the first Salesforce-native platform that provides real-time revenue transparency, allowing you to close more deals, grow existing accounts, and significantly improve forecasting accuracy.
You can make 2023 your most successful sales year by investing in the right people, processes, and technologies. Having the right people in place, preparing your team for the year ahead, and choosing the most effective solutions for account and sales planning will result in more profitable and productive outcomes in the next 12 months.
Next Quarter will increase your chances of success in 2023 with its advanced AI account planning, revenue intelligence, and financial clarity solutions powered by Salesforce. Your best year starts with Next Quarter
Reach out to Next Quarter’s sales team to learn more about making 2023 your best sales year.
