Aggie is the Head of Sales Enablement at AfterShip. She has a passion for transforming Sales Team Performance and a Certified Executive and Sales Coach. Her successful track record spans building and managing global Enablement programs at Pluralsight, LinkedIn and Oracle.
One of my favorite sayings is “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.” by Jimmy Johnson, former NFL coach. A simple statement, yet the illusive ‘little extra’ becomes a focal point of teams around the world, both in the sports and business world.
What could that little extra be in the context of revenue teams? Here are a couple of my observations built on experience in organizations such as Oracle or LinkedIn and enriched by partnerships with clients across other sectors beyond Tech.
The full potential, albeit aspirational and somewhat elusive, is an achievable goal with a timeline. It needs to evolve to reflect the demands of external and internal forces and yet, it can be captured in a few simple principles.
It all starts with Organizational Alignment. If there is unity in messaging, understanding of the message and agreements between departments in the organization in relation to business objectives, it will translate into an irresistible narrative. And that narrative will carry the belief and the conviction in all conversations, both internal and external. I am not talking about slides and stickers with slogans here. I am talking about the ability for everybody in the organization to answer the question: why are we here, what differentiates us, how committed are we to proving that through the success of our customers?
Secondly, organizational alignment needs to show up in the way businesses design business metrics and translate them into clear goals. Clear goals such as Renewal Rate or Number of new logos acquired are good and to work, they need to be matched with insight into best practice of achieving them to inspire excellence and learning amongst peers.
Here are a couple of best practices I saw worked well when thinking about aligning organizationally:
Talking about humans, aren’t THEY the force that drives revenue growth? As of this year there are 5 generations of humans represented in our workforce. And that diversity, experience, variety of expectations and perceptions warrants not only DEI efforts but also maniacal focus on empowering teams to learn (aka fail and learn), acquire and transform the skills needed to thrive. Together.
Oftentimes organizations focus on individual contributors only. They run leadership training for managers and commit to establishing a coaching culture, but as the saying goes, the money isn’t where the mouth is. What do I mean by that? Let me give you an example. Some time I had the pleasure of aligning with a CRO on the importance of their leadership teams’ ability to continuously up their coaching game. We discussed what it would take and the CRO said they rated it 9 on the 1-10 importance scale (10 being the most important factor to their success). Yet, when the proposal including needs analysis and ROI predictions landed on their desk, they were not as inclined to act. In their words: Coaching training sounds good. But I need my leaders to prioritize closing business and not coaching after that’. No wonder that HCI/ICF findings indicate support of senior leaders as the second biggest obstacle to implementing a workforce coaching culture.
My point here is that as a senior leader if you are not ready to create an effort to coach yourself, to support coaching in your organization and look at its impact, then either designate somebody to do it for you or don’t waste organizational money on training. It won’t work if you don’t create a culture of it. Growth mindset in your teams starts with you and you can only empower diversity of thinking and drive impact via accountability when you demonstrate it yourself.
AI is slowly becoming table stakes yet many organizations are not sure how to avail of it. It is very likely that in 2024 the teams that leverage AI will start leading performance metrics charts, leaving the rest of the teams behind. So this is the time to act and experiment with AI solutions for revenue teams.
Here are 2 of my favorites:
Empowered by AI tools, Enablement and Revenue leaders can make better decisions by surfacing team trends in behaviors (or lack of behaviors) early and getting informed suggestions for actions. The same applies to reps - teaching them how to effectively leverage such tools will