The CEO Imperative: Reboot Sales Now

Are you allowing your salespeople to use lead gen and selling methods that are increasingly failing? 

As the CEO of the company, do you know if your team is executing the strategy you and your senior team put forth? 

Do you know what that execution looks like? 

Seriously, have you seen the emails and LinkedIn messages they are sending me? 

They are sending more emails and making more cold calls than ever before. In fact, marketers sent an average of 306 billion emails a day in 2020, according to Statista. I don’t know if that includes what salespeople are sending, but tell me, do you want another email in your inbox? 

While I’m on a rant, let me ask you, as the CEO of your company, how many random calls do you answer per day from salespeople? 

Of those, how many times do you stay on the phone and have a conversation? Book a conversation? Once a day, once a week, once a year? I’m guessing for most of you the answer is never.  

You never take a cold call or answer a cold email.  

So what do you or your senior people do when you need to purchase something like equipment, software, or expensive consulting services? 

• You have someone else do the research and vetting.
• You ask the other CEOs you know.
• You Google. 
• If you get a good recommendation you ask for an introduction.  

So let’s turn that all around now. If that is the way you buy, why do you allow your sales and marketing team to use outdated and ineffective methods? 

More emails or calls that no one responds to are not the answer.  

Do you think your sales leadership is going to fix this? Well, let me ask you, have they fixed it yet? 

Shift in Focus

Some of you are on your way to selling the way customers want to buy. Using outstanding customer engagement methods and approaching your ideal customers in an account-based way.  

It’s your vision and leadership in this shift in focus that is needed. Your sales leadership team can’t make all of the needed changes alone.  

So, it’s imperative that CEOs get involved in revenue ops. Do the work, strategize, and ask questions. Determine what should be measured other than the lagging indicator of sales revenue.   

I’d like to say rant over but alas, I will persist because I know you all want your sales teams to succeed and your customers to be engaged and loyal.  

Peter Strohkorb, Sales Acceleration Specialist and Author of Smarketing: Sell Smarter, Not Harder, and I had this discussion on May 18th, 2021 and you can watch the replay now!  

Watch Now

We talked about the CEO’s role in this new approach to the market, account-based engagement, why your current lead gen methods are failing, what needs to be done to reboot and modernize sales at your company, and why the CEO must lead the reboot.