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Supercharging Sales Effectiveness

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Key Insights

  • Identify key skills for high performance and close gaps with targeted development

  • Implement a proven sales methodology and leverage CRM technology for effective adoption

  • Deliver accurate sales forecasts to enhance decision-making

Sales leaders are facing a tough road ahead. Pipelines are in disarray, with deals dragging on longer than they should. Teams are bogged down by administrative tasks, leaving far less time for closing deals. Productivity is slipping, forecasts are becoming less reliable, and onboarding new sellers is a bigger burden amid higher-than-usual churn. Yet their goals remain the same: help their team build sales capability and accelerate revenue growth.

Supercharging Sales Effectiveness: From Talent Excellence To Precise Execution presents a timely and essential guide for organizations seeking to break through to immediate, predictable and sustainable sales effectiveness.

What’s the urgency? Our research has revealed a dramatic 6% decrease in revenue attainment over the past five years, while win rates have also dropped by 5% in three years. Compounding these issues, buyers now view sellers as mere facilitators of transactions, with less than a quarter of corporate buyers engaging sellers early in the process. Our findings also indicate that sellers are ninth on the list of people that buyers call when they want to solve their business issues.

That’s a problem. Organizations need a new, transformative approach to adapt to the complexities of modern buyer behavior. Sellers need to elevate themselves to the position of “trusted partner”; the first person a buyer will call.   

Sales leaders are stuck navigating skill gaps that hinder sales effectiveness, and struggle to align teams with a consistent sales language. Changing the sales culture or behaviors? That’s often easier said than done. Everyone wants their teams to close bigger deals, faster, and to keep that sales pipeline flowing. The ultimate goal is to build a sustainable competitive edge in an environment that’s always changing.

This guide is designed to tackle these challenges head-on. We’ll show you how to develop top-notch talent in clearly defined roles, pinpoint the sales skills that lead to success, and create a common sales language and methodology. You’ll learn to embed effective CRM methodologies, leverage AI, replicate the successes of your star sellers, and deliver accurate sales forecasts that meet your goals.

What’s the Potential Payoff for Enhancing Sales Effectiveness?

Our research shows that organizations using Success Profiles—a clear understanding of what it takes to succeed in each sales role—see impressive gains: an 8% boost in revenue attainment, a whopping 25% in quota attainment, and a 17% increase in win rates. Plus, these organizations experience 17% lower voluntary turnover and 20% lower involuntary turnover.

And if your sales team effectively adopts a dynamic sales methodology (over 75% adoption), they can expect even more: a 21% increase in quota attainment, a 15% rise in win rates, and a 6% boost in revenue.

We have identified two levers that reliably drive sales effectiveness:

  1. Talent Excellence: Identifying the profile of skills and sales competencies that deliver high performance in your sales organization, conducting a sales talent assessment to understand your team’s gaps to performance excellence, then closing these gaps with targeted development journeys. 
  2. Precise Execution: Deploying a proven sales methodology and common language, then deploying reinforcement technology in your CRM that ensures adoption and closes more deals.

Driving Sales Effectiveness Through Talent Excellence

Attaining talent excellence means arming you with sustainable talent transformation capabilities, leveraging Korn Ferry’s Talent Suite, to accomplish your business outcomes.

Identify: Know What Sales Excellence Looks Like

Without knowing the precise sales skills necessary for success, it’s difficult to nurture the right talent and ensure your team can consistently outperform the competition. 

The Solution: Korn Ferry’s Success Profiles

Enter Korn Ferry's Success Profiles—a powerful sales assessment tool designed to address these challenges head-on. Success Profiles are research-based benchmarks that outline the sales competencies, skills, traits, and drivers needed for specific sales roles. They provide a clear framework for understanding what excellence looks like, enabling you to make informed decisions about hiring, training, and sales performance management.

Specific to sales teams and informed by billions of data points, Korn Ferry has developed 26 individual sales Success Profiles organized into 8 job families. These profiles offer a research-based description of what “excellent” looks like (including leadership excellence) in key client-facing roles.

To further improve your sales performance, Korn Ferry offers the opportunity to create tailored Success Profiles. By customizing these profiles, you ensure alignment with your organization’s strategic goals and the metrics / KPIs you’re trying to affect, making it easier to identify what excellence looks like in your unique context.

Organizations that leverage Success Profiles see significant improvements in sales performance metrics: for just two of our clients, Success Profiles project an uplift of more than $800 million.

  • +8% revenue attainment
  • +25% quota attainment
  • +17% win rates
  • 17% lower voluntary turnover
  • 20% lower involuntary turnover

(Korn Ferry Sales Maturity Survey 2024)

Assess: Understand the Gaps to Greatness in Sales Effectiveness

You need a structured approach to sales talent assessment. Here’s how you can effectively understand the gaps to greatness:

  • Identify high-performing and high-potential talent: Recognizing who excels and who has the potential to grow is essential for building a strong team.
  • Use predictive analytics: Leverage data to understand which sales skills and individuals drive your growth and differentiate your highest performers from the rest of the field. This insight allows you to make informed decisions about talent development, including hire-versus-train. It also allows you to make far better succession management decisions.
  • Employ holistic assessment: Evaluate individuals on their sales skills, competencies, and traits, ensuring a comprehensive view of their capabilities.
  • Incorporate insights into your talent management: Insights from sales talent assessments can now inform better hiring, onboarding, development, sales coaching, succession, and retention.

Research shows that individuals who strongly align with their Success Profiles are 7.5X more likely to be highly engaged in their roles. This engagement translates into harder work, better collaboration, and improved customer care.

Predictive Analytics for Future Success

Advanced analytics can also help predict future sales success and highlight the behavioral and cognitive traits of top performers. Organizations that use predictive hiring assessment tools report:

  • 44% lower involuntary turnover
  • 24% lower voluntary turnover
  • 23% more salespeople achieving their full quota.

Moreover, candidates who score highest on Korn Ferry assessments are 8X more likely to be top performers within their organizations. (Korn Ferry Sales Maturity Survey 2024)

Develop: Supercharging Sales Effectiveness Through Training and Sales Coaching

Investing in formal, effective onboarding and training accelerates ramp time to full productivity and reduces turnover. Best-in-class sales teams provide comprehensive development that prepares new hires to thrive in their roles. Our development journeys, powered by Miller Heiman, focus on three key areas:

  1. Account Relationship Planning: Miller Heiman’s Large Account Management Process (LAMP) helps you create strategic plans and long-term roadmaps for your most important accounts. This process allows you to clearly organize accounts, solidify customer relationships, protect your accounts, and create mutual value.
  2. Opportunity Management: Strategic Selling with Perspective is a sales methodology that helps you win complex deals with a scalable, insights-driven approach. It enables your team to develop pursuit strategies, coach winning behaviors, and close more deals consistently.
  3. Customer Interaction: Conceptual Selling with Perspective prepares your team for meetings by focusing on customer-centric conversations. This approach helps sellers assess buyer needs carefully and avoid misalignment between what customers want and what you present.

Step It Up with Sales Coaching

If you are looking to increase ROI from your investment in sales tools, training, and processes, sales coaching provides tangible business impacts visible in your pipeline and win rates. Organizations with high levels of coaching maturity enjoy:

  • +14% quota attainment
  • +15% win rates
  • -18% voluntary turnover

With your talent identification, assessment and development framework in place, it’s time to take the leap from talent excellence to precise execution. This not only involves closing the gaps to transform talent through training and sales coaching, but also equipping your team with a cutting-edge sales methodology, and empowering them with best-in-class sales tech.

Driving Sales Effectiveness Through Precise Execution

What do best-in-class teams do?

  • They utilize a formal sales methodology which provides a common language for sellers to make it easier to articulate solutions and negotiate effectively. Supplemented with sales coaching and reinforcement, success becomes more easily repeatable. 
  • They lean into the combination of methodology and technology, embedding it in their CRM, and setting up a scalable approach that boosts sales efficiency and productivity for lead/contact management, collaboration, and cross-selling opportunities. 

In other words, they address whole sales organization transformation with methodology, then embed and amplify success with sales technology.  The powerful synergy of methodology and technology creates the foundation for improved sales execution.

Sales Methodology: Unlocking Sales Effectiveness with a Proven Framework

You need a sales-proven approach to develop elite sellers who consistently identify and solve problems. The goal is to establish repeatable, scalable, predictable operating methods that determine the organization's ability to achieve process maturity, go-to-market consistency, and improve win rates. 

The methodology provides teams with a blueprint for optimizing sales performance. It defines “what to do”—managing opportunities, planning client interactions, and protecting accounts—while the skills training focuses on “how to do it,” including building credibility, negotiating, and securing meetings.

Sales organizations who report >75% adoption of their sales methodology achieve:

  • +21% quota attainment 
  • +15% win rates
  • +6% revenue attainment

Tech: Turbocharging Your Sales Process

Sales teams need the ability to understand and predict the outcomes of their activities while accurately forecasting results to achieve success. They require an approach that fosters consistent selling behaviors, supported by CRM-integrated technology that provides reliable data on win rates, deal sizes, and funnel velocity. Ultimately, they want the ability to make better decisions by integrating key metrics and insights to optimize performance and enhance their strategic planning efforts.

Best-in-class sales teams lean into the combination of methodology and technology, embedded in their CRM. This setup creates a scalable approach that improves sales efficiency for lead and contact management, collaboration, and cross-selling opportunities.

Sales organizations who agree that they have sufficient adoption of the sales technologies they deploy achieve +29% win rates and +12% quota attainment.

Predictive modeling: Korn Ferry Sell is a native CRM application that combines sales methodology and technology to increase sales effectiveness. It uses predictive modeling within the CRM to enhance the accuracy of sales forecasting, gain insights and action prompts, and enable more strategic decision-making and resource allocation. Incoming data quality is reflected in meaningful forecasting and reporting.

Having a rigorous forecasting process that drives forecast accuracy reaps dividends, linked to 21% higher quota attainment, 18% higher win rates, and 25% lower customer churn.

Embed methodology at the point of work and need: The platform enables seamless integration of your sales methodology into opportunities for productive interactions and a confident, data-driven approach to closing deals. Gain visibility into the likelihood of a win and receive prompts that help keep opportunities moving forward. This integration allows for actionable strategic account plans and deepens customer relationships by making every interaction count. 

Sales organizations who report a >75% adoption rate of their CRM by sellers see a modest +4% gain in win rates. When a dynamic methodology is added to CRM adoption, however, the win rate increase skyrockets to +16%, a fourfold increase.

No Sales Effectiveness Without Organizational Effectiveness

We have also found that sales talent and sales execution both sit within an organizational system that either supports or impedes growth. Ensuring that the overall sales strategy, people, processes, and enabling technologies are aligned to your goals is tantamount to success.

Korn Ferry can help you diagnose and benchmark where you’re leading class and where you are lagging. More importantly, we help you pinpoint what matters, and why. We can also help you prioritize the initiatives to address your organizational inhibitors to success.

Are You Ready to Transform Your Organization’s Sales Effectiveness?

Korn Ferry’s sales effectiveness consulting solutions empower you to consistently replicate successful wins throughout your organization. 

Through world-beating talent excellence and precise execution, our solution offers a proven model for identifying critical sales skills, assessing your team against what “excellent” looks like, then closing the gaps with a comprehensive sales methodology, innovative tech, and transformative training. 

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