Sales is hard. It’s just a fact. While some people make it look effortless, it’s one of the hardest roles to be in. Sales is often up and down for individual sellers, but what do you do when your organization as a whole starts to plateau?
Stagnation is a common challenge for businesses - it can happen when you’ve saturated your target market and you’re unsure of how to break into a new market or it can happen due to lack of innovation or a number of other factors.
You might have tried multiple things to overcome this stagnation and feel like nothing is working - but have you tried to introduce a Revenue Operations strategy?
Revenue Operations (RevOps) brings together marketing, sales and customer success under a single operational umbrella.
It fundamentally rethinks the dynamics between these departments to drive sustained growth for your company. RevOps isn't just about getting past the plateau; it's about leveraging this teamwork to open new roads for expansion.
Let's explore how RevOps can not only help businesses overcome sales stagnation, but also set a foundation for continuous innovation and development.
Identify the Root Cause
Experiencing a plateau in sales is an important signal, hinting at potential underlying inefficiencies or misalignments that may be plaguing your organization. The first thing to do when identifying the root cause of the sales plateau is to dive deep into as much data as possible.
It’s likely that the root cause is not easily identified. It’s more likely that the sales plateau has been coming for some time, but since multiple factors can contribute to it, it’s not alway easy to see it coming.
Some questions you can ask to help identify the root cause are:
What is my pipeline coverage now vs. last year?
Has my conversion rate changed significantly in the last year?
How many leads are being generated this year vs. last year?
How many opportunities am I closing compared to last year?
How has my average deal size changed in the last year?
Have I had significant turnover in staff in the last year?
What is my churn rate compared to last year?
Is bad data affecting my ability to close deals?
All of these questions can be answered easily with good quality data. It’s so important to have a strategy for capturing data and certain points in time, a snapshot if you will. Setting up a data warehouse or, better yet, subscribing to a tool that snapshots your data for you, can make this process of comparing point-in-time metrics very simple.
By harnessing the power of advanced data analytics, RevOps provides more than surface-level observations. It offers a clear lens through which the core issues affecting sales stagnation can be identified.
By asking the questions noted earlier, we can get to the root cause of the plateau.
What is my pipeline coverage now vs. last year?
If pipeline coverage is down, this could indicate an issue with the business development team or marketing team.
Has my conversion rate changed significantly in the last year?
If conversion rates are dropping, check the reasons opportunities are being lost and when they’re being lost - perhaps a new competitor entered the market and is undercutting your organization on price or there is a problem in your early stage deals, such as a poor product demo that can be changed.
How many leads are being generated this year vs. last year?
If leads have fallen, it could be due to marketing efforts - you might need to invest in new types of marketing or adopt a new marketing strategy.
How many opportunities am I closing compared to last year?
If the amount of opportunities has dropped significantly, it could be due to fewer leads, lower conversion rates, poor sales process, or a number of other factors.
How has my average deal size changed in the last year?
If your average deal size has dropped, it’s important to investigate why that is. Are reps discounting too much to undercut competitors?
Have I had significant turnover in staff in the last year?
Employee turnover takes time to affect sales usually, but high staff turnover is hugely costly, not only due to the cost of getting new, experienced staff in, but the time it takes them to ramp up eats into your valuable selling time. If you’re experiencing high turnover, try to find out why and alleviate the problem.
What is my churn rate compared to last year?
Are customers churning more frequently? If so, is this because the customer success team are not doing their job or because the product is not delivering value? Identify what is causing the churn and rectify it as soon as possible.
Is bad data affecting my ability to close deals?
Poor quality data could be impacting your ability to target prospects effectively, resulting in fewer leads and overall sales.
This process highlights how important each department is to the overall revenue engine. Even teams that are not revenue generators such as customer support and implementation services affect sales. If customer support provides a poor experience, customers will not renew; if a customer has a poor implementation experience, they will be unlikely to return as a customer in the future.
Once the root cause is identified, you can start to take steps to rectify it.
Enhancing Sales and Marketing Alignment
One of the first areas RevOps tackles is the alignment between sales and marketing.
Misalignment here can lead to wasted resources, inconsistent messaging, and lost opportunities. RevOps encourages a unified strategy where marketing efforts are directly tied to sales outcomes, ensuring that leads are not just generated but are qualified and nurtured effectively, thereby increasing the conversion rate and reducing the sales cycle length.
RevOps helps to bridge the gap between sales and marketing departments.
The goal of RevOps is to ensure that leads generated by marketing are good quality leads that the sales team has a good chance of closing, and that the customers acquired will see value from the product or service, and therefore want to return again and again.
It is so important for marketing to have goals that are tied to sales outcomes, not just tied to lead generation numbers. This means having a marketing automation tool that links to your sales system allows you to track leads as they progress through the marketing/sales funnel, from lead to customer.
Prospect: A potential customer discovers your brand while seeking a solution, visits your website, signs up to your newsletter, providing their email. They've become a lead.
Lead: Now on your email list, they'll get updates from marketing about blog articles, exclusive deals, and research that address their pain points.
MQL: When a lead interacts regularly through emails, blog comments, chats, or social media, they're considered a Marketing Qualified Lead. At this stage, the sales team may reach out to pinpoint their unique needs and tailor a solution.
SQL: A MQL becomes a Sales Qualified Lead once they express interest in discussing a tailored solution to address their pain points.
Opportunity: This stage is reached when a Sales Qualified Lead agrees to consider a proposal. This is when negotiations take place.
Customer: Negotiations are completed and the opportunity signs a contract with you.
This approach is not traditional lead generation - instead it focuses on the cultivation of highly qualified prospects who are primed for engagement, boosting the conversion rate and shortening the length of the sales cycle.
But how can this be achieved? How can marketing actually impact the sales cycle? It’s possible, but it requires a lot of thought and effort and alignment. This is where the RevOps team can help!
The first step is for organizations to define their Ideal Customer Profile or ICP. This requires input and alignment across multiple departments such as marketing, sales, customer success, product development and ultimately the executive leadership.
Once the ICP has been defined, marketing can start to address them with consistent messaging, engaging content, and targeted campaigns.
By embedding marketing strategies with insights derived from sales feedback and customer interactions, organizations can tailor their messaging and campaigns to resonate more deeply with their target audience, enhancing the relevance and impact of their communication.
Furthermore, this alignment facilitates a more agile and responsive approach to market dynamics, enabling both teams to quickly adjust strategies in response to customer feedback and evolving trends. If sales and marketing work together, you should see sales start to increase and the plateau start to disappear.
Streamlining Processes with Automation
Another way RevOps improves organizational efficiency is by adopting automation to streamline routine tasks. This approach not only heightens overall efficiency but also enables sales teams to focus on impactful activities like building relationships and strategizing on sales initiatives.
With tools automating lead management, activity logging and more, sales reps are able to spend more time doing what they love to do, sell! Automations implemented by a RevOps team boosts productivity, quickens sales cycles, and maintains momentum, because as we know, time kills deals.
This ensures businesses not only keep pace but can lead in the competitive market.
Some examples of automations led by RevOps are:
Implementing a CRM solution
Implementing a marketing automation tool
Automating the flow of leads to business development representatives
Automatic activity logging tool that logs emails and meetings against opportunities
Automating on-boarding emails after a customer signs a contract
And many more!
Automating repetitive processes is key to the success of any organization in 2024 and beyond, as the pace of business will continue to increase with the rapid adoption of technology and AI.
Implementing a Data Strategy
RevOps thrives off data - both data from systems, such as sales figures, as well as data within systems, such as customer and prospect data.
Implementing a data strategy is key for any organization’s long term success. If you don’t have good quality data on your prospects and customers, you won’t be able to market or sell to them, resulting in underperforming sales teams and high rates of turnover.
Poor data quality can affect sales in the following ways:
Inaccurate Data: This includes incorrect information, such as wrong contact details, misspelled names, or faulty numerical entries that can lead to misdirected communication and missed sales opportunities.
Duplicate Records: Multiple entries for the same contact or account can create confusion, lead to inefficiencies in the sales process, and result in a poor customer experience.
Incomplete Data: Missing information, such as contact details, industry type, or business size, can hinder the ability to segment audiences, personalize communications, or qualify leads effectively.
Outdated Information: Data that is not regularly updated, like old email addresses, past job titles, or previous company affiliations, can lead to wasted efforts and missed connections.
Inconsistent Data: Variability in data entry (e.g., using different formats for phone numbers or dates) can lead to difficulties in data management, analysis, and automation.
Irrelevant Data: Collecting information that isn’t useful for your sales or marketing efforts can clutter your CRM, making it harder to find valuable insights and focus on meaningful engagement with prospects and customers.
Ensuring systems are set up to capture good quality data is extremely important. Rectifying the issues noted above can go a long way to overcoming a sales plateau.
Additionally, data that is extracted from systems needs to be of good quality as well. This relies on sales keeping their opportunities up to date, tracking the sales process as it happens, adding relevant next steps so that managers can forecast accurately, and more. RevOps can help implement good hygiene practices for the sales team, resulting in good quality data to help drive decision making across the organization and help teams close more deals, faster - overcoming the sales plateau!
Focusing on Customer Success
The final pillar of overcoming a sales plateau is customer success. Sales doesn't stop after a contract is signed; customers must see value in the product/service they purchased to ensure continued renewal and/or repeat product orders.
When sales plateau, it is even more important to focus on your existing customers. Existing customers often are easier to upsell and cross-sell to, as they have an existing relationship with your company.
Start by gathering feedback from your customers - this is key to the success of any organization, but even more important when sales are plateauing. By gathering feedback you might uncover a lack of product functionality that you can address easily, or get ideas for entirely new products that you can develop and offer to your existing customer base.
Next, document customer feedback in a systematic way so that you can look at the data in a holistic way. Analyze what’s possible to address and put a timeline against it.
By focusing on customer success, you can overcome your sales plateau in no time!
Conclusion
Sales plateaus are a challenge, but they also offer an opportunity for reflection and strategic realignment. By utilizing RevOps to help overcome this stagnation, businesses can address the root causes of plateaus, leveraging alignment, automation, data-driven insights, and a focus on customer success to reinvigorate sales and embark on a path of sustainable growth. In today’s fast-paced market, RevOps is not just an option; it's a necessity for businesses seeking to overcome plateaus and achieve long-term success.
Think RevOps can help you achieve your revenue goals and overcome any challenges you might be facing in your business today. Get in touch to see how we can help you!
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