sales leader

The First 90 Days for a Sales Leader: A Guide to Success

If you’re a sales VP and have been for more than 2 years – Congratulations, you’re above average! You’ve exceeded the average sales VP shelf life of 18 months. Statistically, it’s just a matter of time before you change jobs.

Maybe you’re a veteran to the role, but you’ve taken on a larger sales organization than before. Maybe you’re a brand-new sales VP and are shaping your leadership skills.

Maybe your company just reorganized. You find yourself heading up an entirely different and daunting sales organization. You’ve been charged with building one out of whole cloth.

Or maybe you’re hovering around that 18-month mark, and circumstances are making you wonder whether you should start looking.

Many of our long-term clients include sales leaders who’ve moved from one company to another. We decided to build a guide for achieving quick wins, avoiding pitfalls, and setting a clear sales strategy in The First 90 Days.

This eBook and series of blogs focuses on helping sales leaders and the unique challenges they face at a new company, division, or group.

After all, it’s up to the sales leader to accelerate revenue growth, improve profitability, acquire customers, improve the buying experience, and successfully fend off competitors.

Sales leaders must take a holistic approach to succeed in their new role. And it all starts during the first 90 days.

Our comprehensive guide contains steps for each phase of a sales leader’s first full quarter:

  • Discovery and Diagnosis
  • Quick Wins
  • Long-Term Strategy

We’ll discuss learnings and stories from executives who’ve “been there, done that”. We’ll also provides tools and a diagnostic that helps discover parts of your new business and act based on the situation.

Discovery and Diagnosis

Within 30 – 45 days, you’ll have a deep and detailed understanding of the health of your new sales organization. The insight comes from the following perspectives:

  • Financial, Metrics & Management
  • Strategy & Structure
  • Enablement & People
  • Processes & Tools

Quick Wins

Within 60 days, you’ll be able to build an operational roadmap. This helps achieve realistic sales objectives and quick wins, based on your learnings. To do that, you need to fundamentally understand:

  • The sales and customer experience your team is currently capable of delivering
  • The cost and efficiency of this delivery
  • Whether management’s expectations are achievable in the timeframe you’ve been given
  • The morale and motivation of the sales organization to change behavior
  • The appetite of top stakeholders to support these changes

Long-Term Strategy

Within 90 days, you’ll be able to set a strategy for achieving long-term success. This is how you and the leadership team have jointly agreed to define it. You’ll have done so while navigating the political and cultural headwinds any new executive encounters.

Leading a sales team today is more challenging than ever before. Reach out to us to learn more about what it takes to be an effective leader today.

About The Author

Author photo Hope is a sales effectiveness expert who builds winning sales organizations. She works side-by-side with sales teams around account segmentation and planning, helping complex organizations rethink the way they serve their largest accounts. Her specialties include sales transformation, sales capability development, leadership development/coaching, and performance management. Hope’s expertise and execution focus mean she’s the consultant that clients want to keep around.

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