James Rores, Co-Founder and CEO of the Floriss Group, is a 30-year sales veteran of 100+ industries, the creator of Floriss' New Growth Curve, and the author of the Sales Leadership Academy AND Collecting WINS™ methodology. We’re proud to PRESENT JAMES’ PERSPECTIVE, “DRIVING SALES STRATEGY WITH DATA.”

Companies that know how to build loyal customer relationships become more proficient at executing ambitious revenue growth strategies, especially in times of uncertainty. Sales and customer-facing teams transform their ability to attract, acquire, retain and expand new customer relationships more automatically. Enlightened customer success and customer experience teams keep the cycle of continuous improvement repeating quarter after quarter, year after year.  

How does this work?  

With access to the right loyalty data, sales, marketing and other customer-facing teams become more aligned around the customer. This customer-centric focus improves their ability to accurately model Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) and Always Buyer Personas (ABP) after their most loyal customers.  

Because the organization knows how to thrill their existing customers, siloes between sales and marketing, for example, begin to fall. Members of both teams adopt positioning and messaging that communicates and connects with the right prospective buyers. They go to market together with the insights required to weld an unfair competitive advantage.  

Ultimately, sales and their supporting teams become better equipped to identify and engage motivated decision makers, differentiate and build value for the right offerings, generate higher conversion rates at each stage of the sales process, and accelerate buying cycles.  

All of this adds up to a more efficient and effective revenue growth engine, capable of operating at a lower total cost while producing compound annual growth rates (CAGR) that outpace industry norms. 

And, with the right tools, leaders can measure and manage the same transformation from start to finish. 

Prior to the past recession, both eventual winners and eventual losers in a group of 3,500 companies worldwide experienced double-digit growth rates. Once the recession struck, however, performance began to diverge sharply – the winners continued to grow while losers stalled out. The performance gap widened during the recovery (see chart). What did the winners do that losers didn’t? They pursued a variety of tactics before the recession that were designed to fortify the firm when the downturn hit – moves both within sales and beyond like adding a low-cost channel to serve small accounts or simplifying the product assortment. 

Prepared companies achieved CAGRs that were 4X those of companies that were not prepared. 

https://hbr.org/2018/11/what-sales-teams-should-do-to-prepare-for-the-next-recession