7 Sales Productivity Secrets to Ramp to Revenue

Whether you’re a chief marketing officer, sales manager or VP of sales, ramp to revenue is a high priority. Ramping reps faster is top of mind because it can shorten sales cycles, help you launch products more quickly, and accelerate revenue growth.

Elay Cohen, CEO and co-founder of SalesHood and former senior vice president of sales productivity at Salesforce, and J.D. Jeppson, regional vice president of enterprise sales at XANT, covered seven ways to increase ramp to revenue in a webinar titled “Accelerate and Motivate Sales Team ‘Ramp to Revenue.’”

1. Sales values

“For me it all starts with values,” Cohen said. “It all starts with cultures.” Culture is key to improvement because then it becomes an ingrained part of your system instead of just another task.

Below are six values that Cohen considers crucial for sales team success:

Create values by digging into the heart and soul of your company. Look at the winning plays. Look at what’s working and not working. Interview your top players and codify these findings into your culture.

2. Use a calendar to create focus

Reinforce your values with a monthly calendar. Calendars align all the sales teams with important actions and the company’s goals.

Use the following calendar items to give you structure and ideas:

1. Kick-off call
2. Theme
3. Prescribed content
4. Weekly sales huddles
5. Celebrate goals and results

This not only provides a sense of comfort to the reps because the expectations become transparent, but it also demonstrates there is a commitment from management.

3. First-line sales manager

Give first-line sales managers coaching aids like reports, deal reviews and product training to help them succeed. The idea is to provide them the tools they need to run their business like entrepreneurs.

4. Run weekly sales huddles

Fact: 50 percent of sales managers don’t run weekly sales meetings. It’s because they’re busy, but then sales teams don’t learn as fast or retain information as well.

High-performing teams spend five to eight hours a month training together as a team.

5. Make pitch contests fun and bite-size

The old way of pitching is to take a slide deck, give it to the reps, and if they’re lucky, they get coaching.

Now is the time to adopt a new way. Don’t do it in one long push. Instead, make it competitive and bite-size by recording and interacting with pitches together. Get your reps up to speed by using competition, peer engagement and by making it easy to do.

6. Gamify deal reviews

Ask your sales reps to record their pitches and score one another. The key is to make it an open and safe environment to learn what works and what doesn’t.

7. Make win/loss storytelling viral

Make your storytelling viral by crowdsourcing stories, sharing video wins, learning from losses and optimizing mobile capabilities.

Watch the full webinar here.

Find past and future XANT webinars here.

For more information on how to develop a world-class sales development team, download this ebook.