9 Questions B2B Sales Leaders Must Answer 2024

9 Questions B2B Sales Leaders Must Answer

1. Why isn’t improving B2B sales effectiveness your most important initiative? Over the last two decades, many sales leaders have chased every shiny object that was put in front of them. Many of these distractions are technological, and others are fads that have no ability to improve your sales team’s effectiveness. It is impossible to identify anything more important than increasing sales win rates.
2. Over the last 12 months, what was the increase in your average win rate? This is a difficult question to answer if sales effectiveness isn’t already top of mind. Every improvement in win rates improves your sales force’s ability to reach their goals and increase their quota attainment. You would do well to track each salesperson’s win rate, as well as your overall win rate.
3. What are your current sales-team development initiatives, and how will they improve your results? It is too easy to execute without doing the work to improve your sales reps. You would be better served by always having a development plan for your team and for each person as an individual. There have never been as many options to continuously level up your sales force. Your team wants you to coach them. Without a competency model and a commitment to developing them, you will repeat your last year, repeatedly.
4. How much revenue generation from pipeline coverage do you generate from the lost deals that make up your pipeline coverage? It seems that a large majority of sales leaders believe their pipeline coverage is the key to success. The truth is that all the dead, fake, false placeholders in the pipeline do absolutely nothing to ensure your success. They contribute nothing to your goals, nor do they create net new revenue. You should only count the revenue of the deals your team wins. Your pipeline should only include deals your team realistically might win.
5. What are you doing to cause your sales force to treat deals like a transaction; or in other words, how are you balancing transactional and solution-based sales approaches? You may be causing your team to behave poorly by telling them to speed up acquisitions. But trying to go faster than your client increases your odds of losing. You may also cause your team to be more transactional by having them prioritize their solution as the centerpiece of the sales conversation.
6. What percentage of your time do you spend with your sales force, essentially how are you managing time management for sales leaders? One reason sales leaders struggle is that they are torn between spending time with their team or spending it with the organization. Consider a company who updates their forecast, even though they have a long sales cycle. The forecast will only improve when the sales leader helps their team succeed, but some people miss this idea. No one has ever won a game by looking at the scoreboard. The better your team, the better your results.
7. When was the last time you joined a salesperson on a sales call; or in other words, when did you last perform sales call observations and feedback? This one may sting a little. It is difficult to know how to help a salesperson improve if you are unable to observe them with a client. If the last time you rode along with a salesperson was when President Obama was in office, you may want to start putting this on your calendar, even if you must miss the second forecast of the week.
8. What percentage of your weekly sales meeting is devoted to non-sales content, or how are you managing effective sales meetings content? Your organization needs you to communicate to your sales force all kinds of information. Some of it is helpful and more of it is less so when it comes to producing the results you and your team are focused on generating. Most of the communication you need to improve results is naturally about selling, and a little less of it recounts the need for more pipeline coverage.
9. When was the last time you explored new sales methodologies, or when did you last invest in one? If you are still using a sales methodology that is closing in on its 60th birthday, you are essentially putting your sales force in a time machine, taking them back in time. What you should instead of taking them to the future, a much better decision when it comes to our ever-evolving B2B landscape. If you need help with this one, go here to explore the cutting edge of B2B sales.

Ask Your Own Questions

From time to time, you need to take account of what you are doing, what your priorities are and make some well-considered changes. The questions here are focused on the sales force and increasing their win rates, or what we call sales effectiveness. By asking yourself these questions, you can plot a path toward your goals by making changes, starting by helping your team succeed. This is part of Sales leader self-assessment strategies.

You may ask yourself a set of your own questions and answer them on paper. If you keep a business journal, you can do this work by taking notes of what shows up for you and any lesson, project, or task you need to complete to move closer to your goals. It isn’t easy to be a sales leader or a sales manager. But you will grow by helping everyone on your team to grow.