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Four techniques for optimizing revenue and getting an extra 
10% to 15% from your sales team:

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Have a laser focused on the right market and market fit for 
your products.

●

Sales and Marketing must be aligned and tightly 
interlocked.

●

Don’t get lost in the big picture, focus on incremental 
details to change and enhance the process.

●

Have the right sales team aligned and excite to promote 
the right results

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Expert Panel

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Right Market and Market Fit

It is easy to say it is important to go after the right markets for your products and those products 
must have the right market fit, but the devil is in the details.  

It is easy to say we understand our ideal customer profile, but again, the devil is in the details.  

There is a big difference between knowing your ideal customer profile and internalizing it so every 
sales action focuses on and caters to that profile.

There are a number of dimensions beyond just objectively being in the right market and having 
the right market fit.  To have an efficient sales engine it also means:

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Focusing on the right types and sizes of organizations that fit the ideal customer profile.

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Focusing on the right buyer within the right types and size of organizations

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Have relevant conversations with the right buyers who understand their need and are 
interested.

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Determining if the buyer and organization have the appropriate timeline for solving the 
problems your product solves. 

Having these four items aligned helps to create an efficient and timely sales cycle.  When these 
four items aren’t aligned it creates an inefficient, time consuming and extended sales process 
where sales reps burn additional cycles to close the sale.

Right Market and Market Fit means Cross Sell and Upsell

Beyond the efficient and timely sales cycle, high growth sales teams and highly successful 
companies grow the lifecycle revenue of their customers.  The cross sell/upsell process starts at 
the beginning of the first sales cycle.  Your product has to bring value, day one and grow and 
provide additional value in the future.  This may mean dividing your product so its solves the 
simpler problems first and allows the customer to grow into the product with subsequent sales.  

If you always have more value you can deliver to your customer you increase your stickiness.  It 
is great for your retention team and it fits in well with getting that extra 10% to 15% out of your 
sales team because Cross Sell/Upsell is closer to the money.  You are not starting at the top of 
the funnel and work the opportunity through all the stages.  You don’t have to win their trust and 
they already have a track  record with you.

The next section covers sales and marketing alignment, but it is important to mention that both 
marketing and sales need to look for companies that will have a long lifecycle with your company 
and with the ability to cross sell and upsell them along the way.

Sales teams will take the commission and marketing teams will show their ROI for bringing in a 
lead that closes, but a single sale that never grows benefits the company a lot less than those you 
can cross sell/upsell.  Companies are starting to include in their sales compensation plans 
customer retention metrics.

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Sales and Marketing Alignment

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The above revenue engine model from Forrester|SiriusDecisions highlights:

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The importance of marketing and sales alignment to have an integrated and tightly coupled 
demand waterfall

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The need to attract customers with cross sell/up sell possibilities to support the customer 
lifecycle section of the revenue engine.

Saying  sales  and  marketing  need  to  be  aligned  is  a  bit  of  an  understatement.    Sales  and 
marketing need to be interlocked, they need to be joined at the hip, they need to be in lockstep.  If 
they are not, you will not be filling the sales funnel with the right market fit companies.  The sales 
team will not have the right materials, case studies, or white papers to help opportunities through 
the sales funnel.  

Being  aligned,  interlocked,  joined  at  the  hip,  and  in  lockstep  means  both  marketing  and  sales 
need to be held accountable from the MQL through to “time to revenue”.

Both sales and marketing need transparency.  Both sales and marketing must understand every 
aspect  of  the  sales  funnel.    They  need  to  understand  the  different  needs  of  different  prospects 
based on how they fit compared to ideal customer profile.  This will help both groups, as a team, 
move the prospect from a marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead and closed-won.
  
Marketing needs full visibility into the sales pipeline and to update sales on why they felt the lead 
was a good fit for the company.  Likewise, the sales team needs full visibility backwards and the 
ability to communicate back to marketing on what’s working and what’s not working.  Visibility into 
the entire process is required so everyone can see what is going on in the revenue engine and to 
build trust.  With visibility across everything, accountability and trust is easier.  

The CRO role helps align sales and marketing by having someone responsible for all of sales.

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Don’t Get Lost in the Big Picture

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It is easy to get lost in the big picture aspect of “How do I get 10% more revenue.

It is the small parts that can change it.  It starts with a series of questions:

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How do I get 10% more calls?

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How do I get 10% more connects?

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How can I increase my conversion rate? 

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How much do I need to increase conversion rate to get 10% increase in revenue?

Incremental changes and incremental enhancements to the process can add up to that 10% to 
15%.  

As an example, if your conversion rate is 20%, that means out of 100 leads you close 20 of them, 
and to get a 10% lift, you now need to close 22 of them.  A 2% increase in conversion rate will 
give you a 10% increase in revenue.

To understand how to get that extra 2% take a laser focus to those customers who bought your 
product in the last year and understand the common denominator between them.  Then focus on 
those type of prospects going forward.

Focus on how opportunities have moved through the sales stages in the past.  Is there a 
particular stage where you lose a lot of prospects?  Dig into the details, devise a plan to reduce 
the loss of opportunities at that stage transition.

Understand the key characteristics [market fit] of the quality opportunities you’ve had in the past 
and figure out how to attract those opportunities more and how to treat them better. 

All of these tasks help fine tune your market fit and enhance your sales process.

It is important to have an aligned and excited sales team.

The first key aspect driving alignment is having the compensation plan aligned the right way, to 
incent the right behavior and overachievement.  The right plan can lead to a huge increase in 
motivation of the reps which can lead to overperformance.

The second key aspect is having the right sales personalities for the right type of sales.  Nine out 
of ten times it would be hard to take a charismatic enterprise sales person who is very organized 
and mentally ready for long sales cycle on a five million dollar deal and put them in a position to 
sell 10K products over the phone.  This may be an extreme example but it highlights that a highly 
successful sales rep in one sales environment may struggle in another sales environment.  It 
requires you to ask the question in every sales cycle: “Do we have the right individual calling on 
that customer?”

Aligned and Excited Sales Team