Build your sales engine for predictable, scaleable revenue.
How to bring a GTM strategy to life, scale revenue, and empower your organization? For you as a leader it is your duty to equip your teams with an effective playbook, efficient sales enablement, performance oriented coaching and the right performance measures.
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As we think the sales operating model (SOM) is of such high importance for your success our SOM framework consits of multiple tactical playbooks and framewoks to deliver a holsitc approach which we adjust to your individual needs. It basically includes:
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The playbook for your team: this playbook bridges your GTM strategy to real live operations of your team. It includes normally:
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Buyer Journey​
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Lead Management Guide
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Opportunity Management Guide
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Account Management/Customer Success Guide
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The leadership playbook: This playbook ankers your effective leadership, supports your decision making and ensures you are in line with your mandates. It includes normally:
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Hiring Formula and onboarding procedure​
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Organizational Design
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Empowerment Model
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FLM leadership development program
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Sales contests and experiments
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Compensation Plan​​​
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The Sales Management playbook: This playboook defines your success map and builds your performance measurement with a focus on input driven KPIs. It includes normally:
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Your individual Success Map​
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Input Metric design
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Pull trough model
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OKR definition
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Reporting and forecasting
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Strategy itself don´t change anything. Methods and Mechanisms do!
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There are three aspects of a well-designed sales methodology:
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The buyer´s journey
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The sales process
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The qualification matrix
Good you made a great GTM plan with a clear ICP, CVP, DMU, Buyer´s Journey and Sales Process definition!
If not, you should do it now before your start with your SOP. The methods and mechanisms you have to install will be comletely different whether you sell to e.g. horizontal SMBs or vertical Enterprise business. But one thing will be true no matter where you sell. You need your RIGHT TO PLAY. You need to be relevant for your customers. This means your sales reps. have to understand their customers. In more complex sales cycles they have to be a genuine consultant and trusted advisor to potential customers.
This requires that the salesperson truly understands the day-to-day job of the buyer. What do they do all day? What is easy, what is hard? What they are struggling with, challenges? What causes stress? What do their bosses want from them? How is success measured for them? AND they need to be able to reframe their situations and challenges. But more about the Challenger Sale later when we talk about your hiring formula. ​
So we ensured your buyer´s journey is understood and in line with your sales process. What´s next. Decide for a qualification matrix.​
...and ship your sales playbook to the team! Too often in B2B sales, leaders leave their sales reps alone without clear playbooks for their sales process which often leads to teams with some high performing reps who don´t need a playbook, many average and below average reps who are not able to catch-up and a lot of unsatisfaction. Another common mistake we have seen a lot in B2B sales: "sales playbooks" are rather focused on the product and new features instead of the buyer´s journey and their sales process. But as well as we need a customer centric business model we need a customer centric sales process. ​
Demand Generation and Lead Management
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Now, you are hoping for leads? Don´t wait for it. Build lead generation in your playbook. What are your channels that work for you? If you want to scale you should build an inbound lead machine! Ensure a constant flow of valuable content (blogs, ebooks, webinars, podcasts etc.) and help your sales reps to build their personal brand in social media. Implement agentic AI to support within this process and increase efficiency. Ensure your inbound lead process - again - is "from customer to product", which means don´t pass all leads to sales, implement an MQL filter. Different to an outbound process not every lead who has a pain is a good fit. ​
The outbound prospecting guide should define if your are using an Account Based Selling (ABS) tactic or more transactional focused cold calling, e.g. on inbound leads. Especially when you want to sell big deals to enterprises the prospecting process needs an ABS approach and a differentiated buyer persona outreach.
Your playbook should define when you transfer leads to Sales (MQL), how to do prospecting and lead discovering and which leads you prioritize. Additional helps your reps with clear sales messaging for each Lead-to-Opp. phase, outreaching tactics, content enrichment and CRM implementations. Sounds a lot of work? GTMindset partners with you to deliver an individual sales playbook ensuring the right outreach approach with every buyer awareness stage. ​
Opportunity Management - Scrap company presentation​
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An opportunity process should be driven by actions of your sales reps. but activities of the buyer persona.
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Did the buyer confirm the summary of the discovery call was accurate?
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Did the buyer open the proposal?
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Did a VP- or C-Level executive attend the product overview?
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Has someone in finance reviewed the ROI study given by the salesperson?
Especially when you participate in complex sales environments with long sales cycles, opportunity management can be very challenging but key for market success.
You need strategic acting account executives or account managers to evaluate the right champions, understand the different CVPs (customer value propositions) of different buying personas in the DMU (decision making unit), qualify the opportunity by more complex qualification matrices like MEDDIC, be able to transfer the investigated customer needs in a reframing concept presentation, hold individual DEMOs, sell pilots for a PoC (proof of concept) and be confortable to talk about pricing and contracting.
Sounds complex? Don´t let your reps. alone and support them with a helpful playbook and technological enablement for:
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Content Enrichment and Account Research Tools
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Pitches and Concept Presentations
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Customer Value Propositions
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Hypothesis and White Spacing
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​Qualification Matrices
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Pay-off Calculation Tools
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Frame Contracts
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Cross-functional Collaboration, e.g. Pre-Sales​
An effective opportunity management process will improve your pipeline velocity, WinRate, customer retentention, customer acquisition costs, signings etc. In short: It lifts your sales excellence on another level. GTMindset supports you with our sales excellence expertise and market insights to build your opportunity management playbooka nkered in your CRM process.​
Customer Success: Cross-funtional collaboration really matters​
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Customer Success actually starts with your solution concept in your pre-sales phase. No matter if you sell more transactional or if you are using a consultative selling approach, no matter if your business model focuses on one-off payments, subscriptions or performance based contracting - you want your customers to be sastisfied, you want your customers to use your solution to solve their problem.​
No secret that the handover from pre-sales to post-sales causes big friction. Not just for the customer but also within your revenue organization. The major mistake we could investigate in the market: the usage of too much standardizing in the implementation process.
​While we try to be as much customer centric as possible during the sales process, a one-size fits all project implementation by your customer success or project implementation team ignors the unique context uncovered during during your opportunity management phase. Few things frustrate a customer more than realizing that the customized solution is handed off to a separate, highly independent post-sales team that fails to maintain the same customer-centric experience delivered during the sales process.
What you need to drive your excellence in this process is cross-funtional collaboration, starting in your conception phase. Especially in complex sales cycles where your most probably sell to a buying center - you need a selling center as well. Have a playbook in place where your pre-sales team, implementation team or customer success team gets involved within the customer concept and takes over the lead after contracting. This will not just improve your customer retention it will increase your WinRate. Why? As it will build trust at your customer when the responsible people for the implementation have been visibly involved during the conception phase.
As it will be impossible to be fully customized for your implementation as well as it might be not very clever to leave your customer success team without a playbook, we recommend to prepare 3-5 implementation scenarios to align best with the use cases and unique context of your customers.
Hire for WHY, organize process driven and onboard with system
We do better in cultures in which we have a good value-fit. So hire for people who believe in and are passionate for your purpose. Don´t hire skilled people and motivate them. Go for self-disciplend, value driven people first. Great leaders hire motivated people, inspire them and give them something to work towards.
But how do your find and atrtact those talents?
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Step 1: Be clear about the profile you are looking for
Statistics suggest salespeople who are intelligent and helpful, rather than aggressive and high-pressure, are most successful with today´s empowered buyer. Establish your theory about the best fitting hiring profil. Ideal are ca. 5 characteristics which can be weighted.
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Step 2: Define tactics how you evaluate each characteristic
Establish an interview process with behavioral questions. Don´t conduct too many characteristics at once. Have an interview process in place where different interviewers conduct for different characteristics. Always summarize your observations in text. Have a systematically scoring model in place to evaluate the candidates fit. ​​
Step 3: Learn and iterate the hiring model
​Review your hirings after 4-6 months. Run a regression analysis based on the gained data to find out what characteristics correlate best with successful salespersons (run every 6-12 months an update of the characteristics).
Step 4: Onboard with a clear system
Train new hires by shadowing not only one good saleperson. Everybody does his/her sales differently which means even shadowing the best seller might not be a good best practice for the new hire, if his/her persona is different. Onboard new hiring systematically with your sales playbook and let them pass exams and certifications.
When structuring your organization, assign the people to the roles and the roles along the process not vice versa. E.g. do not mix new lead managers (e.g. account executives) with account managers (e.g. account manager, success manager). Account management is used to increase the long term CLV of multiple up- and cross-selling opportunities over time with the same account. It might be important to change from account executive to the account manager to manage the account. Otherwise there will be not enough product breadth knowledge to cross-sell and up-sell the account. It is very important to not assign an individual sales force to too many sales processes.
Most important eliminate friction within your organization:
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Have teams with clear purpose
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Have boundaries of ownership which are 100% understood
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Have metrics to measure progress agreed upon (e.g. Marketing vs. Sales SLA)
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Important: the specifics how the team would go ahead to achieve its goal will not be discussed. That´s the role of the team to figure out
Empowerment Model - Enable, Coach, Innovate, Manage Performance (ECIP)​
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The core of your leadership playbook will be your empowerment model. In sales organizations, empowerment is a buzzword that often gets reduced to "coaching." Coaching is vital. But true operational empowerment goes far beyond motivational talks or isolated training sessions.
As a Revenue Leader in a growth environment, you carry the responsibility to enable your teams consistently and in real-time. That means providing them not only with inspiration but also with actionable tools: templates, playbooks, workflows, technological integrations, and fresh market insights.
Empowerment at the operational level demands excellence in four tactical dimensions:
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1. Enablement — Your shipment is the engine of enablement: A true Sales Enablement Leader maintains a high "shipping rate" of tangible assets. Clear playbooks which are CRM embedded. Don't just leave it in a PDF. Integrate these processes directly into your CRM workflows so execution becomes frictionless. Implement technology which is beneficial for your sales people.
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Sell faster: eliminate admin work and mundane tasks for salespeople
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Sell better: create a better buying experience for customers by capturing buyer context and make that context available to salespeople
Quick updates: Markets change fast. Your enablement materials should too. Enablement is a continuous stream, not a one-off project.
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2. Coaching - Along your Driver Tree:
Coaching isn't just about methods; it's about mechanisms. Peel back the onion and make it an integral part of your 1:1s. For instance, if a rep has strong opportunity qualification and a high win rate, but fewer leads are converting into opportunities compared to peers — that's a point for coaching. What's happening in their funnel? How can we tweak?
Structured curiosity beats generic encouragement.
3. Innovation — in the Sales Process, not just the Product:
How often do you innovate the sales process itself?
Think about:
New qualification matrices. Updated sales methodologies tailored to market shifts. Creative reframing strategies for common objections.
Hold regular sparring sessions with your reps to spot areas for micro-innovation. Small tweaks can make massive differences in pipeline velocity.
4. Performance Management — Systematic, not Micromanaged:
You need a clear, understandable, and causal performance management system.
Focuse on input metrics (activities, behaviors) as the leading indicators, not just output KPIs (closed deals).
Cascade from Results to Objectives to Activities in a top-down logic.
And live bottom-up — embedded in your OKR meetings, sales team rituals, and daily practices.
Clarity creates ownership. Ownership drives outcomes.
Your Success Map - A deep dive in what drives your success
The key for the management system is to focus on input and activity based metrics. This means we manage our inputs not our outputs. Companies in general, have very little ability to directly control output metrics. What´s really important is to focus on the “controllable input metrics”, the activities you directly control, which ultimately affect output metrics such as revenue. This means you have to find out which are the drivers of your business, which will, when managed well, lead to increase of profitable growth.
Why we focus on input metrics:
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You can actively manage. Sales people act in their circle of influence.
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You work on the root cause.
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You see signals earlier.
To understand something and to communicate effectively in a way that inspires salespersons to follow, it is fundamental that we understand the cause-and-effect relationship between action we take and outcome we expect. E.g. (simply said) if you want more customers, do more prospecting. If you want greater share of wallet, do more account planning. If you want salespeople to reach full productivity sooner, do better training.
This idea of sales management is called R(esult) - O(bjective) - A(ctivity) and was defined by an extensive research of Vantage Point Performance and published in the book Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana
Defining a success map - which is build on a R-O-A sales management system - has proven to be a very powerful tool to drive high performing teams and implement leading indicators which help you to manage your teams agile and in-time in the right direction. GTMindset has build strong expertise in this systematic to support in building your success map and R-O-A systematic to fire up your revenue engine. Download our resources to learn more or reach out for a personal call if you want to learn more.
