Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
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Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real-world and practical advice to help you develop super-powered sales teams. Well, we are well into the new year now. Most people I feel are back on deck in the saddle, ready to roll for a really big 6 months if your financial reporting runs to a fiscal year, or 12 months if you're in a calendar year period. But regardless, we are back and we are ready to go.
This is a great time of year, in my experience, for strategic planning. Everyone’s back, everyone’s fresh. We’re starting to think about what we did really well last year. Perhaps we’re still holding on to what we didn’t quite execute to the level we wanted to in that past 12 months. But more than anything, we are looking forward with hope. So, we are ready for a huge year ahead and want to make sure that all those goals that we’ve set previously, all the aspirations that we have as a team, can be met over the coming period.
So, I thought today was a perfect opportunity to talk about some strategic planning formats that work. And when I mean work, I mean formats that actually allow us to take forward not just our goals and our aspirations, but some real intent behind making sure we can execute on these. So many times I have seen great strategic plans built that come undone simply because they aren’t executed well. And now that’s not always the fault of the planning process. Sometimes things get in the way, but often I see too many goals, too many ideas, too many action items, and not enough time allowed to complete these over a period of time. Or quite simply, teams that get too distracted from these key goals that they’ve set early.
So today I’m going to run through a strategic planning format that I teach to a large number of businesses and when I mean a large number of businesses over the last 12 months I’ve had 350 salespeople or teams go through this format of strategic planning. And I know that it works because I’ve seen some terrific results, some multi-double-digit figure growth coming out of teams as a result of these strategic plannings. But more impactfully, really high levels of engagement from teams. These are teams that previously were there to see the ball of today, chase that ball, get that ball and then move on to the next day that are now starting to think about longer-term plans and consequently, they’re really enjoying their roles. Above everything else, what I really enjoyed seeing out of the strategic planning implementation is businesses start to grow in more than just revenue and engagement. I’m starting to build processes, starting to build out systems, starting to recognise issues before they happen. Which means that the long-term growth prospects for these teams really rise and rise and rise. Because quite frankly, strategic planning isn’t set up to achieve in a day. It can often take many months and even into years to execute. But when we get it right, it can have a really long-standing impact on our business.
So that’s my intro, my blurb, my logic for investing time into strategic planning. What we’re going to go through today is a format that I use on approach to strategic planning, how we can make that strategic planning stick, and then some additional pieces of, I guess, tips that we can make sure we use to keep the implementation and momentum flowing from a strategic planning program.
Okay, so how do we go about strategic planning? I have a really consistent format that I’ve seen work across my teams and teams that I work with over the last 15 to 20 years. Where we always start, always and without fail, is by having a look at the broader company goals. Most companies are going to have three to five key strategic goals that they’re going to be working towards. Sometimes there’s less, occasionally there’s more, but really we sit between three and five. In the very vast majority of company goal setting, every sales team will typically have a role in the majority of these goals. Of the three to five I’d normally see, let’s assume we had five. I’d normally see a sales team being able to have a direct impact on three or four of those. These are things like revenue growth, customer retention, profit margins, customer satisfaction, systems and processes, team engagement, people uplift. Very common goals that come through from businesses that sales teams can certainly have a serious impact on. And yes, occasionally there are goals that are not relevant to sales teams and we can move away from those things like really strong regulatory or risk-focused activity, really strong IT-focused activity. They’re generally where you have bigger strategic projects that are going to be rolled out through other divisions where a sales team can be called on to provide information, but aren’t necessarily strategic drivers of a process. But I think as sales leaders and even individual business leaders or salespeople, we’re smart enough to be able to work out where the goals we can have an impact on are and those goals that perhaps we won’t have such an impact on and can leave to the side.
So, we take those goals, those three to five goals that we have for the business, and from there we can build out our own strategic goals for the team. Let’s start with one that’s generally going to be in almost every business strategic goal that I’ve seen and that is a revenue growth target. Sometimes profit instead, but very vast majority it’s revenue growth target for us as a team. The first step I take around strategic planning is to have a look what that revenue goal means for us and the types of things we need to be doing to bring it to life. So, if we have a revenue goal in a business that’s all about consolidation, then our sales team goal is going to likely need to mirror a level of account management, a level of repeat business, a level of getting more from the existing customers that we have in the business, or even protecting churn or attrition. If our company goals are ones of rapid growth, then we’re really going to be looking into how we can bring in new customers, but also how we can really drive repeat customers, even referrals, which is obviously a form of new customers, but some goals that centre very much around hunting new business into our company. So that should give you a bit of an idea, a theme around trying to find the key company goal and then paring it down into what a sales equivalent could look like.
So by all means, if we were to take those three to five goals and then pare them down into sales key goals, it would be reasonable to expect that we’re going to have a similar number of key sales goals as we do for the business. So that is always where I’m starting. How can we take the key business goals and channel them into those that are very specific for the sales team?
Second area that I start to look at is a broad theme around the strategic one sentence pitch that we’re trying to achieve for our business. So what is the one thing we are trying to get right within our team that is going to be critical to delivering our broader Goals. If you’d like to have a rule of thumb as to how we can look at this, it’s taking our key goals and summing them into one. So if our goals were to drive revenue, increase profit margins through existing customers and develop our people, our strategic goal might be something along the lines of drive a 25% growth through new customer acquisition whilst increasing by 4 percentage points profit of our active customers through team training, coaching and engagement. Why I like to do this is that it gives us a broad one line that we can talk to our senior leadership team about as to what our sum of three, four or five goals actually comes to sit in towards.
So, we’re taking business goals, we’re breaking them down into three to five sales goals, and then we’re wrapping that up into one nice, simple one line strategy. Okay, so from there let’s work with three key sales goals. We’ve built out three key sales goals. The next step for me is the most important in the process and that is when we start to involve our team. I am absolutely adamant that teams who build their strategic goals, build their activities, build their plans together, are far more likely to implement them as a group. I can bring up lots of survey results out of this, but the numbers jump and chop around so much that I’m very, very reluctant to do so because we can paint almost any picture that we like with statistics. What I prefer to do is draw on the 25-year sales experience and strategic planning experience that I have to say that in general, the years that we have involved sales teams in detail to building out the plans are the years when we have achieved most of those plans.
So, how this could look is we bring together our sales team, our marketing team, if they work closely, our customer service team as well, and any key supporting roles, particularly around administration, around sales support. Even if you have any offshore teams that are working within your business, we bring these teams together and we start to ideate around those three key goals. So if we have a goal that’s specifically focused around revenue growth, we get all the ideas out on the table that can actually drive progress towards that goal. We’re going to end up across three to five goals of between 40 and 80 ideas that will come out over that period of time. There’s no judgment on ideas. We throw them down on a table and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We get them all out as quickly and as effectively as we can. From that point, that’s where we start to sit down as a group and say, okay, we clearly can’t achieve 40 to 80 things across our team over the next 12 months. Let’s start to prioritize those that are most impactful for us to hit our key goals over the coming 12 months. And the best way to do this is to go through each of these and say, if we were not to roll this out, what’s the likely impact on us achieving our strategy? And if that impact is low, that is, if we don’t do this activity, we’re unlikely to achieve our goals. Then that’s when we can look at this idea and say, hey, it’s pretty important. We need to circle that and make sure it rolls through. And typically from this process, those 40 to 80 ideas, we should be starting to see them pull back to 10 to 15 to maybe even 20 ideas that we’re going to prioritize over the next 12 months.
So, let’s just recap here just for a moment, because we are moving pretty quickly in these punchy podcasts. First stage, take the company goals and have a look how they can apply down to the sales team. What do we specifically need to achieve based on company goals? Then we can wrap that up into one sentence so we have a communicable pitch or value prop that we can put out to our leadership team around what we’re trying to achieve in the next 12 months. We then take those goals and we ideate into all the possible opportunities we could take advantage of to really bring these goals to life. We’re going to end up with lots of them, which we then need to say, okay, it’s time for us to slow down and prioritise these ideas into those that are most important. So, we’ve got to the stage where we’ve prioritized the ideas and we have 10 to 15 or so really key, chunky, chunky opportunities that we can apply across our three goals.
The next stage is to start to build out plans on these. What are we going to do to make sure that we hit these goals to bring these ideas to life? And this is where we can start to use a format that has idea next steps, who’s responsible, due date, and really importantly, what success looks like. It’s very, very important for any team that I work with that we are clear on what success looks like for each of the ideas. I.e we don’t need to think about have we passed or failed on the implementation of that initiative when it comes to March, July, October, whatever it may be, because we’ve set the bar now in terms of what we want to achieve.
So, an example might be if we are looking to grow repeat customer business within our team, and we currently have a 25% return rate of customers. What success looks like might be an increase of 35% return business across the next 12 months. Really easy to measure. If one of our goals is to roll out a training program. What success looks like is that we have a training program that is built out annually, revised quarterly, and run each and every week for 45 minutes. Really clear success goal. If we have a goal here of wanting to increase profitability by increasing contract terms from 12 months to 18 months. Right. We can set a metric here that says we need to have an additional 55 contracts signed at 18 months instead of 12 months in the coming period of time. So, we set goals that are generally very smart, driven, specific, measurable, accurate, reliable and timely, or specific, measurable, accurate, relevant and timely. I don’t mind which ones you want to use, but we certainly make sure that we are building out goals that we can measure ourselves on.
Okay, so we’ve set our goals against the business. We have wrapped them up into one sentence, we’ve ideated, we’ve picked the best ideas, and now we’ve started to build out some action plans as teams that we want to be rolling out.
The next step for me, and this is an optional piece of the strategic planning that some teams use and some don’t. And that’s a financial waterfall. So that’s a piece that says we are now at $100,000,000 of sales, we’d like to get to $150,000,000 of sales. Or we’re at $10,000,000 of sales and want to get to $15,000,000 of sales. Or we’re at $1,000,000 of sales and Want to get to $2,000,000 of sales. It doesn’t matter. But we build out a waterfall that shows all the initiatives that are going to get us from our $10 million to our $15 million in sales. Right. What that $5 million gap is. And we step through each of our initiatives and the financial contributions they can make to our key measurement item, which in most cases is going to be revenue, but occasionally could be gross margin or profit. It doesn’t matter as long as we’re mapping that out and we step through each of the key activities. Look up waterfall graph if you’re not sure what it means. Very easy to find through the Internet. But we also need to put in gross negatives. So, these are types of activities that might pull us back from our 10 million to $15 million target or 100 million to $150 million target. Right. Or for the really big businesses, you have 5 billion to $5.2 billion target. Right. The gross negatives such as customer loss and so forth, that could pull us back. So, by mapping these out, what we’re doing is we’re putting some financial levers directly against some of our more qualitative strategic options that we’re going through.
Okay. So that’s a really nice way to financially model it. Next piece we start to look at is what needs to go right for this to happen. And that’s a broader business focus where we can sit back and say, okay, here are the key things that need to happen over the next 12 months for us to really nail our strategic planning. And we then flow into some quick wins and some momentum building activities. Where are we going to start, what are we going to do to build momentum and how are we going to make sure that this program really works? We finish off by making sure we appoint some caretakers of our strategic planning or project champions. Certainly, I’ve got some great names around, storytellers, motivators, celebrators, and some programs that work around it. Please get in touch if you want to know more about those. But the key message here is that we have people that shepherd through the strategic planning to make sure that it happens. Because if we have just reliance on a sales leader only, it gets really difficult right when we don’t have the rest of the team engaged. I generally like to have three people as a minimum that see through the strategic planning.
So, let’s recap on that because there’s a lot of information in there in the last 18 minutes or so. Number one, we set our strategic goals for the sales team against the company goals. We bring them from broader business into specific sales team. We then wrap that up into one sentence so that we can communicate it with our leadership team or board if that’s the key area we’re focusing on. From there, we start to ideate around the best ideas, typically the 40 to 80 best ideas. We bring them into the priorities, the 10 to 15 that we’re going to be able to succeed or realistically hit this year. We build out some plans around those as a team so that everyone’s accountable and everyone has a say as to which way we’re going. Once we’ve built them out, we then start to look at a financial waterfall. So, actually put some numbers around how we’re going to hit our targets. Next stage from there is we start to look at what needs to go right for this to be rolled out properly, it allows us to bring in broader elements of the business to more than just a sales strategy. We then look at building some momentum, some early wins, some quick wins, and appointing some project champions. Right. Nice. 10 to 12 slide deck strategic plan should come out of this that is really concise and allows us to be very focused around what we’re doing next.
Okay, so two more things that are really important when it comes to strategic planning. Number one is what I call the review the refine and reroll out program. So that’s where we’re actively reviewing our progress, refining our goals, because things do change in any period of time, certainly within a year, but often even shorter than that, and we’re then rerolling out that program. So, the easiest way I recommend to do this is we do it quarterly. We set our strategy in, let’s say, January. We review that at the start of April, the start of July, the start of October, and then we’re probably back into January planning again. It’s really important because it allows us to cross out what’s no longer relevant, tick off what we’ve done, but also adjust those things that need to be tweaked a little bit. So, that’s step one.
The second point that’s really important is how we allow ourselves time to make sure the strategic planning happens. My strongest encouragement here for leaders and teams when you’re rolling out strategic planning is that we need to use some calendar management tools to make it happen. So, what I typically suggest is a couple of hours in the calendar every second week. So, two hours on a Friday morning or a Friday afternoon tends to work best where we can throw these into the calendar. And we know that we’re going to be focused on our strategic planning. So, in essence, it ends up being an hour, a week or two and a half percent of a 40-hour week. Right. Really, really little. But it allows us to make progress and keep the ball rolling. Super impactful. If we can do it.
The next piece around this is to make sure that our project champions are also accountable. But we get some support around strategic planning where we need it. If we’re not the experts in the team, go and find others in the business. If there aren’t people in the business, go and find external help. If you need to do a combination of both, fantastic. External help can be paid. External help can be through mentors, external help can be through other colleagues. It doesn’t matter. What we need to be doing is making sure that we’re making progress and by having someone around us who we can bounce ideas off, that really helps keep us accountable because the ideation process continues.
Okay, so that is a short and fast approach to strategic planning that I’ve really seen work. I’m going to go through the broader summary again once more so that you can write down any notes that you’ve missed. But essentially we take the broad company goals, we disseminate them down into goals that actually are applicable to us as a sales team and wrap that up into a one-sentence pitch that we can communicate across the business. We then ideate, we look for 40 to 80 ideas that we prioritize down to 10 to 15 key ideas where we build out great strategic plans and action items around with a clear piece around what success looks like once we’ve completed each item. From there we start to look at a financial waterfall to map out financially how we’re going to hit our targets, what success looks like and how we then build quick momentum. So, the what success looks like and quick momentum is essentially getting off to a fast start so that we can find some early wins and build motivation across the team.
Last but not least, there is we appoint some project champions whose responsibility it is to make sure we bring this to life and then set the times in our calendars to make sure we’re a reviewing it quarterly. I suggest to review, refine and re-roll out and then certainly that we’re allowing time in our calendars so that each week or every second week we have some dedicated focus time on rolling out our strategic plans.
So, there you go. Strategic Planning 101 in a nutshell. It’s a really great process to make it happen and I strongly encourage anyone out there to give that a go or get in touch with me if you’d like to know more about it. I have done hundreds of these strategic planning sessions and programs, really enjoy doing them and certainly know that there are intricacies with every business that we sometimes do need to consider.
So that’s it from me today. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E98 Building a Strategy That Your Team Will Buy In to and Execute
