A sales department is only as good as its leadership. Private equity-backed portfolio companies need best-in-class sales leaders who can drive continuous growth for their team. Sales leaders must shoulder increasing responsibilities and meet higher expectations, benchmarks which will only rise as market volatility adds urgency and lowers the margin for error. In order to both drive revenue expansion and motivate their teams, sales leaders need a core set of management skills.
1. Metric-Based Management
Today’s revenue leaders need to root all their decisions deeply in data. The CRM must be consistently and accurately updated to ensure accurate data-based decision making. Setting key indicators and metrics to hone focus is essential. To determine these goals, best-in-class CROs begin with an end goal in mind and work backwards to determine the key metrics which will be most important at exit, then create a roadmap based on that decision to achieve those results. Metrics that tend to define these standards include:
- Revenue and EBITDA
- Gross retention, net revenue retention
- User adoption, customer stickiness
- Quota achievement
- Sales productivity across the team
- Rule of 40,...