VP of Sales

Your job is more complex than ever. You are in charge of developing a strategic plan to exceeded yearly quota, determining the right mix of channels to address your company’s market segments, leading and developing your direct reports, ensuring that your sales department doesn’t go over budget, integrating with marketing and product departments, and most importantly growing the overall company revenue.

Executing against all these directives requires a very broad skill set, from selling to strategy.  Yet for sales executives, sales strategy can often be an afterthought.  More often than not, executive sales management is focused on the tactics of monthly/quarterly quota achievement because those are the immediate goals; they receive tremendous pressure from upper level management to hit monthly and quarterly quotas, and everything else falls by the wayside. The question I hear most often from Sales VPs when I talk to them about sales strategy is, “How will crafting an effective Sales Strategy make my job easier?”  Here are two powerful reasons:

• First, it will align your sales team with executive leadership’s vision.  Quota isn’t the only thing that your company’s board of directors and C-level executives want from you (although if you’re not hitting quota, nothing else matters).  They are all trying to achieve a strategy, and aligning your department to achieve that strategy is the second most effective way to make them happy (you know the first).

• Second, a good sales strategy will help you hit your quota for years to come.  Strategy deals with the most powerful improvements in your sales organization, and is the only way to sustainably grow revenue.  Sales strategy results in faster sales cycles, more profitable sales channels, improved customer loyalty, better understanding of your customers, and a tighter integration with marketing.