Serent’s Growth Team specializes in helping technology-enabled businesses achieve their goals.

Over the past 11 years, Serent has partnered with more than 35 portfolio companies and evaluated investments in thousands of others. As a result of our Growth Team’s hands-on work with our portfolio companies, we have compiled our perspectives around the major components of an effective sales framework in this eGuide. 

There are many ways to support the sales function inside a company as it scales, but one of the best parts of sales is that it is the most measurable function as well. The challenge for companies ends up being on whether they can use the tracked performance to manage effectively. Our experience points to performance management in sales revolving around three areas.

Building and hiring the sales team is only the first step in enabling the sales team to be successful – much of the ongoing impact comes from training and onboarding the sales team. There are many flavors of training, though a lot of the general best practices around sales training focus on sales skills. To enable sales training, we often focus on four components.

Sales teams can create the optimal sales territory design for their go-to-market function by taking a few steps. They should leverage an understanding of the market database, prioritize account targeting and use key components of the sales strategy. The sales territory design heavily influences any sales team. It dictates the organization, the responsibilities of each role in the sales function and provides perspective on the sales organization’s size. Below we examine the essential steps for determining the optimal sales territory design for any B2B company.

There’s no single, standard template for designing a sales playbook. You have to consider a laundry list of factors like the size of the deal and the product’s complexity. Do you have a good understanding of the need for the company’s product in the marketplace? What’s the competitive intensity in the market? And also, what’s the complexity of decision making for the customer? These are some factors that will influence your company’s overall strategy for sales on how it will pursue bookings growth.

As soon as your customer and prospect database is up and running, the next step is to prioritize accounts and advise sales representatives on how best to focus their efforts.