Welcome to blog three in my series exploring the strategic insights CROs and sales leaders need in order to drive predictable revenue growth in 2025.
To recap – in blog one I looked at how to start with the right purpose and shift perspective to the buyer. Whilst in blog two we examined how to identify, adopt and scale high-performance sales behaviours, and how to measure their success.
In this blog, I’ll be exploring step three – how to drive sales behaviours one step at a time.
Once again, I’ll be calling on the expert insights of Kate Philpot, Vice President of Global Sales Enablement at Getty Images, and Darren Loveday, Chief Growth Officer at Mention Me, who joined us for our recent webinar.
So, let’s dive in.
Why is an iterative approach important?
Sales transformation cannot be a one-shot approach.
Too often there’s a desire to fix everything at once. But take a pause…
The highest-performing organisations take a more strategic approach. They identify the gaps in individual and team performance and employ best practice approaches that harness the compounding effect of incremental gains, turning new skills into habits over time.
It is this stage, in particular, where you need to throw out the rule book when it comes to sales training. Here’s a few surprising statistics about traditional methods to get you thinking:
- Sales reps typically forget 70% of the information they learn within a week
- 87% of skills taught are forgotten within 30 days, without reinforcement
- 5% of reps take 10+ months to become productive enough to contribute to goals
Traditional sales training methods tend to focus on a universal snapshot of ideal seller capabilities, without any nod to continuous improvement or buyer-led purpose.
It’s time for a new approach to sales transformation.
My top three tips to drive sales transformation one step at a time
- Create a growth mindset and culture, with everyone seeking to achieve 1% improvement every day. And importantly, embed ways to celebrate this culture of growth.
- Run ‘always-on’ sales development programmes to shift the dial for the whole business via training, coaching and reinforcement.
- Consistently measure and celebrate behavioural and commercial improvements to drive lasting sales transformation.
Do the experts agree? And what works for them?
Best practice examples include diagnostics that both map behaviours to buyer needs and identify potential skills gaps and upskilling opportunities, along with playbooks and frameworks that drive replicable behaviours.
Mention Me uses competency frameworks in combination with diagnostic tools such as data analytics and Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs). Darren explains: “We know that underperformance is not down to one thing or one individual. It’s about understanding the context across the business and putting in place a training and coaching strategy to help people hit numbers in a consistent way, as well as always being ready to adapt and learn new ways of doing things.”
Getty also utilises PIPs and leans heavily into coaching and role plays to get a good sense of how people are performing. Kate believes it is incumbent on sales leaders to lift as many stones as possible to understand how to help reps survive and thrive in the modern sales landscape. Her advice is to “devote a lot of time to coaching. Help sellers build fulfilling careers through continuous training coaching and development.”
One step at a time wins the revenue race
Let’s be honest, not all sales training is built equally.
Buyers are changing faster than traditional sales training can keep up. As a result, 55% of people making their living in sales don’t have the skills needed to be successful.
Just investing in “more of the same” sales training is not enough
High-growth organisations like Getty and Mention Me are shaking up the sales training playbook. They know where to invest for the greatest ROI, and they implement tailored training, development, and coaching programmes that fit the specific gaps in their sales team performance.
That’s where Flume comes in.
Ready to take the next steps toward predictable revenue growth?
To hear more from Raoul, Kate and Darren watch our free on-demand webinar, and download our Driving Predictable Revenue Growth whitepaper for actionable strategies to help scale your team’s performance and build a repeatable, predictable revenue engine.
Or get in touch with Flume right now and take your first step towards a future of high performance, consistency, and confidence that your sales will hit, or even better, exceed your 2025 revenue targets.
