How To Crush Your Goals this quarter
A new quarter brings fresh opportunities and a renewed focus on achieving goals. If you are an enterprise B2B account executive, the beginning of a quarter is a critical time to set the stage for success and to crush your goals. Here are our top 5 actionable strategies:
1. Review, Reflect, and Refine:
Don’t underestimate the power of a thorough review before diving headfirst into the new quarter. Think of it as a strategic pause, a chance to learn from the past three months and position yourself for a winning streak ahead. Here’s what a strong review process entails:
- Three Whys from Sales Wins: Ask the champions within the accounts you closed: Why did they sign anything? What exact pain were they addressing? Why did they sign now? Where was the urgency? Why did they buy from you? What were the top 3 differentiators that they perceived? What could be improved?
- More prospect feedback: Gather feedback from lost clients. Why did you lose? To whom did you lose? Use this feedback to refine your sales approach and value proposition.
- Performance Analysis: Scrutinize your numbers. Hit your quota? Analyze win rates, deal sizes, and sales cycle lengths. Identify trends and areas where you excelled or fell short.
- Pipeline Review: Don’t just assess the size of your pipeline, but its quality as well. Are there deals at risk? Are there high-potential opportunities that need nurturing? Prioritize and strategize accordingly.
- Lessons Learned: Identify what worked well in your sales strategy and what roadblocks you encountered. Did a specific messaging tactic resonate? Did a particular outreach method prove ineffective? Learn from both successes and failures to optimize your approach.
By taking the time for a comprehensive review, reflection, and refinement process, you’ll gain valuable insights and set yourself up for a more productive and successful quarter. Consider this a crucial investment in your future performance.
2. Prioritize Ruthlessly to crush your goals:
The new quarter is here, and your time is valuable. Not all accounts hold the same potential for growth and revenue generation. To maximize your impact, it’s crucial to prioritize ruthlessly. Not all accounts are created equal. Analyze your pipeline and prioritize high-value opportunities. This might involve focusing on existing customer expansion or targeting key decision-makers at dream accounts.
- Pipeline Analysis: Dive deep into your MEDDPICC Score Calculator and analyze the opportunities. Consider factors like:
- Deal Size: Focus on deals that align with your quota and contribute significantly to your revenue goals.
- MEDDPICC Score: Prioritize deals with a high likelihood of closing while weighing their size.
- Customer Lifetime Value: Look beyond the immediate sale. Consider the potential for upselling, cross-selling, and long-term customer retention for recurring revenue streams.
- Customer Segmentation: Categorize your accounts based on their strategic fit and growth potential. This might involve focusing on:
- Existing Customers: Identify expansion opportunities within your current client base. Upsell new solutions or explore ways to increase their existing usage.
- Strategic Accounts: Target key decision-makers at your “dream accounts.” These are high-profile companies that align perfectly with your offerings and hold immense growth potential.
- Focus on Champions & Economic Buyers: Don’t waste time chasing unqualified leads. Research and identify the key stakeholders within your target accounts. Where is the pain? Who suffers the most from the pain? Tailor your outreach and messaging to resonate with their pain points and goals.
3. Develop Champions to close deals:
In any opportunity, Start With the Pain, the same way you Start With Why for anything. Then figure who in the organization is suffering the most from the pain. Schedule meetings with those key stakeholders. If you can’t qualify them as a Champion or as the Economic Buyer, you may be wasting your time.
- Build Rapport with the Champion. Understand their priorities, challenges, and personal wins. Align your goals with their wins while ensuring your solutions address their pain points.
- Have reasonably frequent 1-on-1s with them. Personal relationships are not built in groups. They are made during 1-on-1s when you talk about anything but business.
- Help them. They may need a white paper, a book, a connection, or a business case from another client similar to what they do (make sure you are authorized to do so.)
- Empower them. Connect them to their peers and other champions you have with other clients. Connect them with your manager, your CS team, your SMEs,…
- Ask them to help you. Ask questions related to the competition. Check if they can review the decision criteria. Ask them in a friendly way, if they would put the deal in the forecast if they were in your shoes. If you have been to MEDDIC Academy workshops, you know a lot more of these “asks.”
4. Refresh your MEDDPICC knowledge to crush your goals:
- Review your MEDDPICC course.
- Revisit your workshop notes if you have attended one of our live workshops, virtually or in person.
- Review the book Always Be Qualifying
- Identify which lessons have become habits. Those are the actions you took correctly and gave results. Review how you were able to do so. Celebrate the transformation of these lessons into habits.
- Identify those lessons that you learned in the course and that you are not applying daily. Analyze the reason. Take a new approach with them. Retry in another way. Attach them to other habits so that they can become habits. Read the book (or the summary of) “Atomic Habits”.
5. Ask for help to crush your goals:
- Schedule time with someone who can help you with all the above. That person can be your manager, your VP, a sales coach, a mentor, or someone you trust as a credible source.
- Ask them the same questions you asked yourself.
- Review the lessons that have become habits with them and check if they agree.
- Identify the lessons you are not applying daily to them as well. Analyze why. Take a new approach to them.
By following these top tips and delving deeper into the wealth of MEDDPICC resources, enterprise B2B account executives can maximize their chances of achieving goals and exceeding expectations in the new quarter. Remember, a strong start paves the way for a successful finish!