You bought Pipedrive. You have salespeople. Shouldn’t that be enough to get your revenue goals?

While Pipedrive has elegance in its user interface and power in its functionality, business results still rely on execution. And, as Rockefeller, said, “Business is easy … if it weren’t for the people.”

When we have users that have to execute, the tools should check the boxes on managing information, communication and tasks, but the management of the people and processes are critical.

At TruPotential Group, we fix people problems and one of the many problems we solve is user adoption. This involves change management, which happens any time you are seeking to grow your business.

We come alongside managers and teams to help with business results and here are five practices we have worked with teams to drive sales results:

1. Recruit the profile.

   People are hard wired to behave predictably. At TruPotential Group we use Team Culture Development with our clients to identify winning profiles based on personality assessments and recruit similar candidates. This doesn’t guarantee the same results, but you reduce probabilities of bad hires and also drive predictability on user behaviors. Furthermore, the automated coaching ongoing helps improve performance while keeping a management dashboard for ongoing motivation and self-awareness for team members.

2. Manage the numbers.

   Start with what you want to measure. Start with 3-5 key indicators of success. It could be revenue in next 30 days, close rate by salesperson or number of demos or consultations conducted. Create your dashboard first so you know what you are measuring. Make it public. Make it competitive. Show the team where they stand in real-time using Pipedrive insights. And comment on the numbers continuously. It lets the team know what you care about and what you expect.

3. Create follow-up value.

   Most of sales is following up. However, salespeople have a tendency to be known as pestering people rather than people of value. Ensure your marketing team members are tied in closely. They can work on email templates in folders and link to content on your website, social media or Youtube channel that provides timely and relevant value to prospective customers that would welcome help in growing their businesses. The content has to be substantive and rock. Allow your salespeople to use a library of content freely based on the relationships they develop. Make the process of creating content easy and continuous with regular weekly communications to your salespeople to use what is new and remind them of what works to get engagement.

4. Integrate speed.

   Look at every step of engaging a prospective customer and remove obstacles that would impact speed. There’s always opportunity to become more efficient. List out all your sales steps. Add the timeframe you expect and build this in as a practice and expectation. Measure this within your insights as well. You want to move through tasks and pipeline stages quickly. Your salespeople are effectively managers of process.

5. Cut losers.

   If a process step is not working, cut it. If a salesperson is not performing after much coaching, fire them. If a customer is troublesome and volatile, get rid of them. There’s a cost to running an operation and you only make it harder when you have noise, troublemakers and drama. You can free up your focus and bandwidth by continually assessing what works and doubling up on winners while getting rid of losers.

The goal of Pipedrive is not to have more software to capture information. You can do that with your pen and paper. You should be able to scale revenue in an efficient, easy manner. The software enables talented and capable people to get results.

If you need help driving revenues higher than you have them today, engage us and we can assess how to help.

In this video, Mr. Dalrymple and Mr. Milliken delve deeper into the topic.