How to Achieve Sales Productivity in a Portfolio Company

Part two of the revenue engine addresses how the defined selling actions will be executed. Driving high levels of proficiency in interpersonal selling skills creates a differentiated experience for customers when interacting with the selling organisation.

Additionally, pacing matters when driving skill adoption. The reason: quick skill adoption generates early results, which positions the PE firm to realise the potential value of the portfolio company faster. Moreover, accelerating skill adoption minimises the time out of market demanded during instructor-led sales training. 

Advancing this process will enable leaders to:

1. Drive engagement that translates to revenue
2. Reduce the sales cycle
3. Reduce turnover due to higher levels of plan attainment

Taking steps to accelerate skill growth moves the portfolio company closer to measurable and rewarding outcomes. Research from Gallup illustrates just how expansive those rewards can be. In their review of 49,495 business units with 1.2 million employees across 22 organisations, they discovered that those who focus on building employee skills realise a 10% to 19% increase in sales and 14% to 29% increase in profit.

How to Do It

Identify the skills that most closely correlate to the growth strategy of the organisation. Creating demand from newly sourced clients as a revenue driver requires a different set of skills than, for example, increasing conversion rates from an existing pipeline. Begin by understanding which skills have the potential for the most immediate impact on your growth strategy.

Additionally, accelerating skill adoption requires coaching. When leaders commit to a consistent coaching cadence, they demonstrate their commitment to change and their vested interest in seeing sales professionals improve. Effective coaching means giving sales professionals guidance to embed best practises into their daily work. This approach to skill development ensures that the training survives into the field where skills can generate results. Choose a limited number of new skills, be specific, provide immersive hands-on training experiences with a lot of practise time, and equip your managers to coach to the desired skills.

Regular communication provides the coach with more visibility into things like pipeline assessment, deal qualification, future business forecasts, the strength of sale analysis, and early detection of potential problems with a sale. This detail enables an in-depth measurement process, which leads to more predictable revenue streams. More importantly, measurement also leads to larger revenue streams. Research from Bain shows that metric-driven initiatives “increase profitability by as much as 25% over sustained periods” for sales organisations.

It is easy to see why this finding is true given that coaching instills a shared sense of achievement. As sales professionals see the measurable outcomes from coaching, they develop a greater buy-in to the value coaching offers. This buy-in is critical because it leads to engagement, and engaged employees “produce better business outcomes than other employees — across industry, company size, and nationality, and in good economic times and bad,” according to Gallup data collected from more than 195,600 US employees.

Equip Sellers, Managers, and Change Leaders With Tools That Deliver Data-Driven Insights

Modern sales transformation initiatives leverage technology that guides progress
and informs each stakeholder about that progress along the way. This approach begins by establishing baselines for activity and skill proficiency. Next, leaders must visually represent changes in knowledge and proficiency to engage sellers in their own development.

Measurement like this is increasingly important given that the average annual sales training spending per person has reached $2,326, according to the Association for Talent Development.

Effective measurement guides the training process as it unfolds. Sales professionals discover where they need to focus their attention and where their blind spots reside. Measurement is for the learner as much as it is for the leadership. Additionally, analytics ensure that the leader’s and the sales professional’s time is being invested in the right areas. Success comes from:

1. Guiding managers on who to coach, what to coach, and when to coach
2. Informing change leaders on engagement and reaction data for all aspects of the change programme
3. Capturing real-time changes in operational metrics that align to your growth strategy to quantify economic impact

How to Do It

Sales professionals, managers, and change leaders can leverage a range of metrics to ensure the effectiveness of training. For example, a metric like engagement seeks to answer how learners are progressing through training. To answer this question, the leader must know what portion of the team is enrolled in training. Engagement is ongoing. Therefore, engagement is an ever-present characteristic of training effectiveness.

However, enrolment alone does not signify engagement. Leaders must go further
to capture the engagement picture by drilling down to other factors. For example, progression tracks the participant’s progress toward a key learning milestone. Frequency measures a learner’s rate of engagement by revealing how many days have elapsed between learning sessions.

Other metrics like experience ask how memorable training is and how excited learners are to participate. The experience of learning matters because it drives adoption. Measurements in this category can include net promoter score, course rating, confidence, qualitative sentiment, and commitment to change. Measuring experience gives leaders the information they need to make the adjustments that ensure skills will translate from learning to real selling situations.

Finally, effect asks if training has improved business outcomes and skill adoption. Participants will be more committed to the process if they can see a clear line connecting the material in training to skills they believe will create success in their careers. Many use the Kirkpatrick Model to measure effect. With this approach, training effectiveness is gauged across four key areas: engagement, behaviour change, knowledge retention, and business results.