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Let's talk about rules of engagement. The kind of rules of engagement that dictate how your sales team interacts with prospects and customers — and with each other. We’re talking about the rules between sales and customer success, between inbound and outbound, between new leads and old opportunities, between geographically distributed prospects, and on and on.
Rules of engagement (which we’ll often refer to as RoE) are challenging. And we know that dealing with the fallout of unclear rules of engagement — the conflict — slows down revenue velocity. So how can you improve your RoE and increase your revenue velocity?
There are a few areas that could make your RoE more complex. Be sure you’ve thought through these potential challenges.
Deal complexity. If your company has complex deal parameters, like channel partners, accounts with parents and/ or subsidiaries, or multiple product lines, it inevitably leads to more RoE conflict. Who takes ownership of a parent company if one of their subsidiaries is already a customer? What happens when a rep who is tasked with selling Product A learns a prospect is talking to another rep about Product B? How do you handle inbound prospects from partners? The more complex your deal profile is, the more likely you are to run into RoE issues.
Data, or lack thereof. Effective RoE relies on clean data and a tidy CRM. It means you need enough information about a prospect to know how to assign it — things like company industry, revenue, employee count, location, and more. It also means your CRM really has to be the single source of truth in your organization, and that everyone keeps opportunity data up-to-date. A lot of RoE challenges begin as data quality issues before turning into a full-blown conflict. You’ll never have perfectly clean data, so think about how you defend against disputes caused by bad data.
Market segments. How well defined are your territories or market segments? It can be hard to account for every possible market segment. Even if you’re dealing with geographic territories, how do you distribute those territories evenly among reps? Finding the right market segmentation — one that both is and feels fair — is hard. Further, you likely have to tweak this regularly, causing confusion about who’s supposed to work which segment.
Attribution, especially as it relates to marketing. Attribution requires accurate lead-to-account matching to be sure inbound leads are always matched to existing accounts when appropriate. It also means you need clear rules about who gets credit when an outbound rep is working a deal that also inbounds around the same time. How do you keep your inbound and outbound efforts in sync?
Dishonest rep behavior. It’s not common, but it happens, especially in larger organizations; sometimes reps will deliberately break the rules to get to the better deals.
To learn how to manage these issues, as well as how to create or update your rules of engagement, and so much more, download the toolkit above!
Sales rules of engagement are challenging. And the conflict that comes with unclear RoE slows down revenue velocity. It's worth the effort to clean yours up.