The first quarter of the year is always a time to reflect and look to the future simultaneously. It can be a daunting task in the oft-unforgiving world of sales and service. How will you repeat or even expand upon the success from last year? How can you learn from your mistakes?
The answer is pretty simple, but the strategy is where people fall short. This is where Ascent Cloud comes into the mix. As an end-to-end suite of sales performance management solutions, we exist with the sole purpose of helping businesses plan, execute, and grow their strategy to see the most desirable outcomes.
It’s a three-step process, and it might include three powerful tools that work together seamlessly to boost business. So when you’re looking to consolidate your tech stack to excel in 2024, consider these three words: plan, execute, and grow.
The first step in any business strategy is the planning phase. You compile your research, you investigate your resources, and you consult the necessary parties involved. When it comes to sales, this process often involves territory planning, or the way in which you structure your business at scale with geography as a reference point.
Territory Planner by Ascent Cloud is the critical launch point for this plan, execute, and grow lifestyle. With Territory Planner, businesses across the board are finding it easier than ever to plan their sales territories in a way that makes sense for them. There is no longer a reliance on spreadsheets, nor the limitations of a traditional CRM.
With Territory Planner, sales and revenue leaders are able to take their most crucial data — no matter where it is housed — and have it populate instantly on a map. There are options to optimize, filter, and layer data using different constraints and structures catered more specifically to your unique business needs.
Automating the territory planning process is the only way to go, plain and simple. With Territory Planning by Ascent Cloud, the “plan” is able to move to the “execute” phase more efficiently than if you were to use traditional means of planning and strategizing business.
With the right plan in place, it’s now time to act on it. There are so many philosophies when it comes to the proper way to execute a sales strategy that it’s hard to know which way to turn. To make matters even more complicated, there are so many sales tools that claim to work the best and yield greater results.
We tend to go where the science tells us. In the case of executing on your sales plan, it’s all about the power of data visualization. And no one does it better than the founders of the space: Geopointe by Ascent Cloud.
Relying on a geolocation software like Geopointe to execute your sales plan brings what we like to call geoanalytics into the mix. Simply stated, geoanalytics is a form of data visualization that contextualizes your data and uncovers insights through geographic location. Those insights, that context? That’s the sweet spot where low and middle performers are enabled to move the needle into high performer territory.
With Geopointe, your mapped data tells your teams when and where to spend their time. It gives clear calls to action — whether that be viewing a cluster of at-risk accounts that might have been neglected, structuring a plan of attack for daily calls or trips in the field based on things such as account size, ARR, etc, or just inviting room for more visibility as a whole.
The “execute” phase of the plan, execute, grow strategy is extremely dependent on working smarter. You must extract the most value out of every rep, every business deal, every tool in your tech stack.
For instance, Dobson Fiber saw a 20% increase in rep productivity after implementing Geopointe. By removing their reliance on spreadsheets and using the features inside of Geopointe, Dobson Fiber was able to hyper focus on their targeting and overall efficiency.
After the past few years of economic ups and downs, a 20% increase in anything is worth exploring.
You have your plan, you have the means to execute on that plan, and now it’s time to think big — and we mean BIG. How are you planning to grow in 2024? It’s important to note that growth is so much more than just revenue (even though more revenue is always a good thing).
When we talk about growth, the only thing that makes any amount of sense is LevelEleven by Ascent Cloud. This sales coaching and gamification tool helps grow individual performance and company revenue in a number of ways that keep teams engaged and motivated.
Without proper sales coaching, growth is not possible. Plain and simple. You want your sales reps to get bigger and brighter each and every day of their career. LevelEleven promotes skill development and performance in an extremely unique way using Scorecard metrics and a consistent standardized approach to coaching with documentation all in one place that emphasizes behaviors that lead to results and the data behind it all.
There is a sort of one-two punch when it comes to LevelEleven, and that is the addition of gamification using leaderboards, Badges, and Competitions. These standard methods of gamification in the workplace are proven to foster healthy competition, improved motivation, and reinforce behaviors that yield desired business outcomes.
Let’s say you’re a sales manager who uses LevelEleven and you’re preparing for your weekly 1v1 meetings. In this scenario, you’re looking at Scorecards to see how your team is performing against the goals you set for them and you notice that everyone is struggling to hit the mark when it comes to booking demos. Naturally, you will use the coaching solutions inside of LevelEleven to help your sales reps, but you also decide to start a Competition around the tracked business activity that isn’t doing so well across the board.
In a matter of minutes, you will have set up a sales contest to rally your team around a number that’s important to your revenue goals, and you will be helping with skill development along the way.
With consistent coaching and gamification, growth is inevitable. And everyone might just have a little bit of fun along the way.
You’ve learned a lot today, dear reader. Hopefully you have a deeper understanding of what it means to really plan, execute, and grow this year and beyond, as well as how to accomplish it.
With Ascent Cloud, there are three extremely powerful tools at your disposal: Territory Planner, Geopointe, and LevelEleven. Of course they can be used on their own for a more a la carte experience, but we tend to believe in the power of plan, execute, and grow — and we hope you’re starting to, as well.
