Development Guide

DDI COMPETENCY LIBRARY 3.1

© Development Dimensions International, Inc., MMVIII. Revised MMXIV. All rights reserved.
 ALIGNING AND EXECUTING SALES STRATEGY
Establishing a plan to achieve the unit’s sales objectives, taking into consideration overall
business and sales goals, market opportunities, past sales results, and available resources;
reviewing progress and adjusting the plan as needed.

Key Actions
• Gathers information—Identifies/Recognizes the need for additional information
and obtains it by clearly describing what needs to be known and asking relevant
questions.
• Prioritizes sales opportunities—Systematically evaluates sales unit
opportunities and targets markets and accounts with the greatest potential for
producing positive business results.
• Creates sales unit plan—Creates strategy for realizing the unit’s sales objectives;
considers business goals, the sales organization’s direction, market penetration,
past sales results, and available resources, including marketing support.
• Monitors plan—Collects and reviews data on a regular basis to determine course
of plan and evaluate the need to adapt to changing conditions; makes necessary
adjustments to the plan or processes.

QUICK TIPS
• Base your sales unit plan on solid research of your markets, territories, and customers.
Enlist the help of your sales and marketing support staff to share information as they gather
it throughout the year.
• Conduct territory review meetings throughout the year to understand your customers’
needs and changing business priorities.
• Clearly define the life cycle of your product or service. Ensure that your sales strategies
address this life cycle.
• Ensure that you have a good sales unit plan. A good plan is more than a copy of your sales
team’s territory plans; it should include a clearly defined vision of where you want to go as a
sales organization and how you’ll get there.
• Develop a clear definition of your ideal market based on desired size, geographic
boundaries, potential revenue, accessibility, and history. Collect this intelligence by talking
with your sales and marketing people.
• Ensure that your sales unit plan includes a sales strategy for your overall marketplace as
well as a tactical sales strategy for your existing and prospective customers.

© Development Dimensions International, Inc., MMVIII. Revised MMXIV. All rights reserved.
 • Describe your competitive landscape as well as your resources and capabilities (e.g., staff,
products, services) in your sales unit plan.
• Make sure your objectives for the year are specific, measurable, action oriented, and
results based. Specify the time to complete them as well as any milestones to be achieved.
Include short-, mid-, and long-term sales forecasts.
• Once you create your sales plan, set short-, mid-, and long-term objectives together with
deadlines for achieving them, and then stick to your deadlines.
• Create a schedule for reviewing your sales unit plan and commit yourself to checking it.
• Communicate to your sales team and your manager any changes to your sales unit plan as
they happen.
• Remember to be both agile—able to change direction at a moment’s notice—and patient.
When setting deadlines, keep in mind that a successful sales plan takes time to bear fruit.
Deciding when to be patient and when to make adjustments to the plan are often the
greatest challenges.

Questions to Guide Development

Use these questions to help you determine your level (or your employees level) of proficiency at
this competency.
• Tell me about a time when you were able to successfully implement a plan for your sales
unit by aligning it with the larger organizational business plan.
• What actions have you taken in the last six months to enhance the execution of key
initiatives to ensure sales results?
• Describe a time when you had to overcome obstacles to integrate the organization's
strategic direction into your sales unit plan.
• Describe a situation in which you had to align the people strategy for your sales team with
the organization wide business strategy to attain the sales objectives for your unit.
• Describe the procedures you've used to measure the implementation of short-, medium-,
and long-range sales forecasts.
• Oftentimes a sales unit's sales bob up and down like a roller coaster. Describe what actions
you took when this happened to your unit.
• Describe a time when you analyzed sales data to make sales forecasts. How accurate were
your forecasts?
• Describe the last time you evaluated your unit's sales performance against your business
plan. What did you look for?

© Development Dimensions International, Inc., MMVIII. Revised MMXIV. All rights reserved.
 • Sometimes sales leaders can't pursue all the sales opportunities that require their support.
Describe how you have set priorities for competing sales opportunities.
• Do you have a system for managing your unit's sales objectives? Describe a time when
your method helped you meet your objectives.
• Give me a recent example of how you helped your team set priorities among various sales
opportunities.
• Sometimes you can't physically manage every sales opportunity that comes your way. Tell
me about a time when you passed up one sales opportunity in favor of another.
• How do you determine which of many possible sales opportunities are most likely to bring
success? Give a recent example of how you selected among various opportunities.
• Setting priorities for sales opportunities can be challenging. Tell me about the last time you
could've done a better job of setting priorities.
• Tell me about a time when you were responsible for creating a plan to meet your sales
unit's goals. Describe how you developed and executed the plan.
• Do you have a system for managing your team's sales funnel? Describe a time when your
method helped your team meet its sales goals and a time when it didn't.
• Sometimes sales plans don't work out the way we envision them. Tell me about a time
when you created a plan for your sales team that was less than perfect. Did you make any
adjustments or changes as a result?
• Tell me about your current sales unit strategy. Specifically, what has worked and what
hasn't? For the part that hasn't worked, what have you done about it?

DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES
Self-Directed
• Build a realistic sales unit plan by researching your markets, territories, and major clients.
Define the types of information you need, appropriate sources, and data-collection
strategies for each of these. Then, enlist the help of your sales and marketing support staff
to collect, organize, and share information as they gather it throughout the year. Review the
data critically and consider the implications for your markets, territories, and major clients,
both in the near and distant future.
• Review past sales, current trends, and future market projections to set your sales targets.
• Prioritize your accounts by identifying the top, middle, and low-end performers. Ensure that
you use a balance of qualitative and quantitative measures to evaluate your accounts.
• Take the time to reflect on where you want to go as a sales organization. Then write a
sales unit plan that is forward thinking and includes stretch objectives.

© Development Dimensions International, Inc., MMVIII. Revised MMXIV. All rights reserved.
 • Decide how you want to sell to your customer organizations. For example, do you want to
sell products or business solutions? Or would you like to sell at the strategic level and
actively contribute to the direction of the organization? Then, prioritize your accounts based
on these goals.
• Attend a strategic territory and account management workshop to understand these at a
more intensive level. Although a sales unit plan is more than the amalgamation of multiple
territory plans, it does share some of the same components.
• Create a sales unit plan that includes these strategies:
 Growth—Increase the share of wallet or share of business.
 Attraction—Target new prospects in the marketplace who would benefit from your unique
value proposition.
 Retention—Anchor your high-value, profitable customers.
• Create a marketing plan that includes these elements:
 A description of your market, including its size, geography, and customer demographics.
 A sales strategy for your overall marketplace as well as a more tactical sales strategy for
your new, existing, and prospective customers.
 A description of your competitive landscape as well as your resources and capabilities
(e.g., staff, products, services).
 Your objectives for the year, which should be specific, measurable, action oriented, and
results based, and should specify the time to complete them as well as any milestones to
be achieved.
 Your sales forecasts in the short, mid, and long terms.
• Set up a schedule to monitor your sales unit plan, both at a surface level and more deeply.
For example, schedule a quarterly review.
• Review past sales unit plans, and then compare them to your sales figures for those years.
What patterns can you find? Analyze your successful and unsuccessful years. Did you
adjust your sales plan late or early in the year, or not at all? How did these decisions pay
off in the end?
Partnerships
• Build networks both inside and outside your organization. Networks inside your
organization can provide you with information about the company’s direction and key
priorities; outside networks can provide market intelligence, such as industry trends,
competitor knowledge, and specific customer information.

© Development Dimensions International, Inc., MMVIII. Revised MMXIV. All rights reserved.
 • Schedule an interview with a leader from a customer organization who can coach and
provide you with industry- or customer-specific market data. Create an interview guide and
review it with other sales leaders to prepare for the interview.
• Single out one territory and one territory manager. What high-yield activities do they do?
Look back at the activity in that territory over the last five years. What patterns can you
extract from the data?
• Ask your sales team to present you with a SWOT (i.e., strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities, and threats) analysis of their major accounts and overall territory plan.
Evaluate that data and integrate it with strategic considerations to create your sales unit
plan.
• Meet with leaders at various levels and functions within your organization to understand the
company’s strategy from different perspectives. This knowledge will help you establish
criteria for evaluating your markets and customers.
• Create your sales targets organically with the input of your staff, and then restate the final
objectives to them for their clarification and buy-in.
• Validate your sales unit plan internally. Discuss your plan with various leaders at different
levels within your organization to ensure that you’re on track and that your vision matches
the organization’s direction.
• Review another sales leader’s well-written sales unit plan with your coach. Discuss the
elements of the plan and what makes them effective.
• Review last year’s sales plan with your coach. Did you achieve the plan? Was the plan
itself a useful road map? What changes would have made it a better plan?
• Take time in each monthly sales meeting to review one objective on your sales unit plan.
Do a quick check to see if that objective is being met. If not, determine what changes are
needed. Use this opportunity to collect valuable input from your sales team.
• Establish a customer review strategy with your salespeople. Ask them to identify obstacles
as well as future sales opportunities within each of their accounts. Conduct reviews on a
regular basis.
Targeted Assignments
• Attend a meeting during which your peers will present their sales unit plans. Listen to how
each person communicates the plan. What did he or she do well, and what could the
person improve upon? Try out what you learned from each individual’s approach.
• Seek an assignment in the finance department to hone your researching and forecasting
skills.

© Development Dimensions International, Inc., MMVIII. Revised MMXIV. All rights reserved.
 • Conduct a three-year analysis of one particular account. Review its overall growth as well
as the activity within the account. What can you learn from this detailed review that you can
apply to other accounts?
Workshops
Look for workshops that address the following:
• Developing strategic plans.
• Creating a sales unit strategy.
• Improving account management.
• Improving territory management.
• Writing SMART objectives (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound).
• Estimating and forecasting.
• Determining your competitive landscape.
• Selling your vision.
• Developing research techniques.

ADDITIONAL LEARNING RESOURCES

Practical Advice
Barney, J., & Clifford, T. (2010). What I didn’t learn in business school: How strategy works in the
real world. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
Byham, T. M. and Wellins, R. S. (2015). Your first leadership job: How catalyst leaders bring out
the best in others. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
FitzRoy, P., Hulbert, J., & Ghobadian, A. (2012). Strategic management: The challenge of creating
value. New York: Routledge.
Jordan, J., & Vazzana, M. (2012). Cracking the sales management code: The secrets to measuring
and managing sales performance. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2010, March). Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut?
McKinsey Quarterly, (2), 58–67.
Kahneman, D., Lovallo, D., & Sibony, O. (2011, June). Before you make that big decision. Harvard
Business Review, 6(89), 50–60.
Lake, N. (2012). The strategic planning workbook (3rd ed.). Philadelphia: Kogan Page.
Simerson, B.K. (2011). Strategic planning. A practical guide to strategy formulation and execution.
Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

© Development Dimensions International, Inc., MMVIII. Revised MMXIV. All rights reserved.
 Treace, J. (2011). Nuts and bolts of sales management: How to build a high-velocity sales
organization. Austin, TX: Emerald.
Case Studies
Capon, N. (2010). Key account management and planning: The comprehensive handbook for
managing your company’s most important strategic asset. New York: Free Press.
Cron, W.L., & DeCarlo, T. (2009). Dalrymple’s sales management: Concepts and cases (10th ed.).
Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Contemporary and Classic Insights
Blenko, M.W., Mankins, M.C., & Rogers, P. (2010, June). The decision-driven organization.
Harvard Business Review, 88(6), 54–62.
Bungay, S. (2011, January/February). How to make the most of your company’s strategy. Harvard
Business Review, 89(1/2), 132–140.
Cravens, D.W., Le Meunier-FitzHugh, K., & Piercy, N. (2013). The Oxford handbook of strategic
sales and sales management. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Duhaime, I., Stimpert, L., & Chesley, J. (2011). Strategic thinking: Today’s business imperative.
New York: Routledge.
Laursen, G.H.N. (2011). Business analytics for sales and marketing managers: How to compete in
the information age. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Zoltners, A., Sinha, P., & Lorimer, S. (2012). Building a winning sales management team: The
force behind the sales force. Evanston, IL: ZS Associates.
Web Sites
CEO Express ([Link] site with links to sources
for the business advisor.
Harvard Business Review ([Link] to many of the articles
published in Harvard Business Review, along with a sales and marketing section. Articles
available via subscription or purchase.
Hoover’s Online ([Link] and company information from a subsidiary of
the Dun and Bradstreet Corporation.
MarketWatch ([Link] and economic-related news, analysis, and
information.
Sales and Marketing Management Magazine ([Link] links
to how-to articles, but a subscription to the magazine is required to read most articles online.
SalesVantage ([Link] contributors focused on sales and
marketing topics; primarily a directory of resources.

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© Development Dimensions International, Inc., MMVIII. Revised MMXIV. All rights reserved.
 Sloan Management Review ([Link]
to many of the articles published in the journal, particularly those connected with financial
acumen.
Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) ([Link]
resources available to members.
Strategy+Business Magazine ([Link]
U.S. Business Reporter ([Link]
reports.

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© Development Dimensions International, Inc., MMVIII. Revised MMXIV. All rights reserved.