In Flume’s latest blog series, I’m exploring the strategic insights CROs and sales leaders need to drive predictable revenue growth in 2025. We’ve already established what a buyer-led purpose means for building consistency and confidence into revenue targets. In this instalment, we’re looking at what good sales performance looks like. We’ll be tackling how to identify, adopt and scale high-performance sales behaviours that make the biggest difference to your buyers, and importantly how to measure their success to drive continuous improvement and growth.
Once again, I’m not alone. I’m deep-diving into this issue with a little help from two sales leaders – Kate Philpot, Vice President of Global Sales Enablement at Getty Images, and Darren Loveday, Chief Growth Officer at Mention Me.
Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room…
83% of your sellers might be underperforming right now
Pareto’s law is well and truly in action in sales today.
17% of sellers typically account for 81% of revenue. This means that most organisations are heavily reliant on the performance of just a few top sellers to drive sales success and therefore revenue growth. Are you amongst them?
Flume’s research is clear. High-growth organisations exhibit consistent experience-driven, high-performance sales behaviours.
How to agree on what good looks like and measure it
Here at Flume, we believe that there’s a clear three-step process to identifying, adopting, scaling, and measuring good sales behaviours:
- Identify high-performance sales approaches, map those to the modern-day buyer journey and scale these behaviours with the use of toolkits, frameworks, coaching tools, and templates
- Consistently assess deal health across the entire buying process and have a focus on qualifying out, not qualifying in – i.e. know what a healthy deal looks like so you can spot the unhealthy ones.
- Consistently break down revenue targets into key KPIs (e.g. sales velocity – number of qualified opportunities, win rate etc) so you can map trends and build sustainable and consistent high-performance sales approaches
Focus more on how to upskill and improve total team performance.
What do your peers think?
Darren certainly agrees. His organisation has adopted a ‘winning by design ‘ sales framework. He believes sales leaders are remiss if they don’t take the time to evaluate how their sellers sell – what lands and importantly what doesn’t. Darren recommends experiencing individual seller delivery – listening into calls and evaluating them – identifying the barriers as well as the behaviours/approaches that work best. Then build a framework to boost win rates by, mapping good behaviours, setting expectations, and “solving the problem” via training, coaching and culture change.
It works – Mention Me now has 97% revenue predictability, because as Darren puts it “we re-wrote the rule book”. Mention Me set its north star – identified what good looked like to help drive performance against key win rate KPIs, put the foundations in place to help their sellers improve performance, and then built a programme to help them “repeat, repeat, repeat”.
Kate agrees – she says the revenue opportunity is simply too good not to try. She points out that the process was eye-opening at Getty, literally dismantling all previous assumptions about how things should be done. She says shifting sellers to good, and even great, is a fundamental part of the CRO or sales leader job description.
Getty worked on untangling the knots in seller performance and giving them compelling reasons to change. Her biggest advice is to be realistic, remove the barriers to being successful through training and coaching, and set KPI’s to ensure participation, and prevent sellers from falling back into what she calls “simply transacting”.
Build your framework for improving sales team performance
Businesses with an easy-to-use framework to benchmark high-performance behaviours and put in place standardised, impactful sales approaches will absolutely drive predictable revenue growth.
- Step I – Identify high-performance behaviours: sales leaders need to be constantly educating themselves on what good looks like and adapt sales rep behaviours accordingly.
- Step 2 – Bottle the brilliance and codify best practice: emulate high-performance behaviours across the sales team by creating tools kits and robust approaches that deliver impactful behaviour change.
- Step 3 – Measure success and drive continuous improvement: set KPIs and implement a consistent coaching programme that drives transformative, sustainable, and measurable revenue growth driven behaviours.
High-growth organisations make high performance unavoidable and undeniable. Companies that standardise sales processes see up to a 28% increase in revenue, and significantly outperform their peers.
Ready to take the next steps toward predictable revenue growth?
To hear more from Kate and Darren watch our free on-demand webinar, or download our Driving Predictable Revenue Growth whitepaper and access actionable strategies to help you scale your team’s performance and build a repeatable, predictable revenue engine.
Alternatively, talk directly to our team who can explore any challenges and work with you to drive predictable revenue growth in your organisation.