Welcome to Hustle in the Darkness Newsletter

Reflect and Focus Forward in 2024

WELCOME

Welcome to "Hustle in the Darkness", Cribworks's weekly newsletter, a collection of stories, data points, and more all centered around sales, sales optimization, and business development (internal and external). We want to make you more successful in and out of growing your accounts, business, and most importantly…yourself.

This weekly newsletter is to give you 1 actionable takeaway across on of these 3 core areas:

• Sales/Business Development

• Strategy

• Sales Pipeline

Let’s dive in.

SALES/BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
One Takeaway This Week - A Point of Reflection - Take 15 Minutes

Welcome to 2024! We are refreshed, revitalized, and reenergized for the year! Right? We often find ourselves battling endless calls, business strategies, and how you can close the next deal.

Post-holiday season, have you reflected on 2023 at all? Not just from everyday work but from where and when you could engage with your customers, potential customers, team, partners, conferences, webinars, and so on.

We often get stuck in the same cycle of doing the same thing again and again. And….again.

What were some of the highlights from 2023 for you? It could be:

• That conference you sponsored for $25k didn’t spur any leads

• You are getting more engagement in supporting our customers in the construction markets than in the healthcare markets

• AI is becoming more of an essential day-to-day tool across organizations

• Everything costs more money nowadays

• The list goes on…

So, will you continue down the same path, or pivot to where you’ve had the strongest impact?

Get targeted. I mean really targeted.

Appropriate Expectations - CEO/Leaders

Celebrate success, and learn from the failures. The breakdowns don’t always happen at the sales stage that might be in question, try looking further upstream.

Look at your sales pipeline and look at what has been working and not working. Are you consistently having a drop-off of qualified leads when they move through your customer sales journey? The problem doesn’t always lie in that specific stage.

How you qualify your opportunities, how your team can move opportunities forward in the pipeline, go/no go decisions, etc.

Make sure your CRM has a dashboard so you can look at your top wins, losses, biggest account growth, least account growth, etc.

Audit Your Customer Journey & Process. Pipeline health is critical. Not every deal you bring in will be a close, or close when you want it to close. If you are responsible for the sales pipeline, opportunities, accounts, etc., make sure it is set up so you know the process. You might not know all the deals, but you know the stages and journey.

Want to be able to move faster? Evaluate and align your sales operations and enablement to see where you can move more efficiently.

Appropriate Expectations - Team

Surprisingly, many sales teams overlook documenting their wins. They rely on their CRM for this. Ensure you keep a record, especially if you plan to negotiate compensation or interview for a new role. Key metrics to record include:

1. Your top three deals (Bonus: compare with your team/company's top three deals)

2. Average deal size (Bonus: compare with your team/company's average deal size)

3. Quarterly and total quota attainment percentages for 2023

4. Biggest losses (learn from them) - Please tell me you are…

5. Account growth (How many deals, value, etc.)

6. Trusted Advisor (Are you becoming a trusted advisor with your client?)

7. Building your network (Yes…always be building!)

Reflect on these numbers, find conversations that you can talk with your team on (i.e., building deeper account relationships), your clients, and where you can have your best year yet.