Here are tips to get ready for territory reviews either at the start of the year, quarterly or mid-year to exceed revenue goals. All too often we wish we would have done more planning, preparation and enablement at the outset of a year, quarter or month. Instead, we procrastinate and do nothing.
What are you doing to help your teams build pipeline and close more business? It’s not enough to tell our teams to go develop more pipeline and close more deals.
Here’s a sales planning checklist you can use to get a fast start on your year, quarter and month.
Sales Planning Checklist
#1: Assess and document pipeline and sales capacity gaps to ensure you have enough marketing and sales resources to hit and even exceed your goals.
#2: Customize territory and account planning templates and expectations to account for pipeline gaps, revenue goals and go-to-market plans.
#3: Prioritize accounts and enrich account data with contacts and suggested compelling events to help your sellers initiate outreach and conversations
#4: Work with marketing to create updated buyer personas, short and long sales pitch materials, customer stories, email outreach templates and first call qualification guides to enable your teams to own self-sourcing pipeline. If you give them the tools they won’t have any excuses to do the daily prospecting work.
#5: Communicate the sales plans and sales coaching material being developed with your teams so they are aware of the investments in time and resources you’re making in their success. The training and ongoing coaching is intended to help them and should be seems as value-add benefit versus compliance.
#6: Coach your teams on planning, prospecting and selling with learning paths by role so they have the confidence and competence to succeed. Make the training bite-sized and relevant to their revenue goals.
#7: Have everyone create, share and even record their territory plans and account plans to get feedback from managers, peers and teams. Do this before quarterly business reviews or team meetings to optimize collaboration and accelerate outcomes. You can learn more about our 5 Minute Territory Planning template here.
#8: Baseline performance and measure results so you can assess what’s working and what’s not working. Be sure to baseline metrics like pipeline, win rates and deal size. You can learn more about top sales enablement metrics here.
We have a library of proven coaching content and templates for territory planning, account planning, prospecting and more. You can request access and a trial here.
Win As A Team
Getting ready for territory reviews is a team sport. It involves sales leadership, sales operations, marketing and sales managers to be aligned. Sales leadership needs to make enablement and territory reviews a priority. Sales operations needs to make sure we have the right data and territory assignment to ensure everyone knows what their targets and winning sales plays. Marketing needs to provide us with the pitch and product marketing collateral to enable our teams. Finally, sales managers need to know their coaching role and most importantly be ready to reinforce the messaging and sales plays.
