Does your company need a sales turnaround? As we enter the new year, it's a great time for us to take a fresh look at our sales performance in our companies and take action to turn around those aspects that we're not satisfied with or which are lagging behind our expectations. Putting together a sales turnaround plan for your company can be done fairly quickly and fairly easily.

The first thing is to pull together key opinion leaders in the company, not just from sales and marketing, but are from outside and other departments, such as finance, operations, product development, etc. and to ask yourself, "What is it that we can do to improve our sales? How can we rally the whole company around making those improvements? What are the easiest and most rewarding opportunities that we have? What are the complacencies that have set in to our sales team that we need to eliminate? Are there territories that are underserved? Where are our best opportunities and how are our sales teams aligned to capitalize on those? What is the individual performance of each of our sales people and what are we doing to take corrective action with a poor performers or move them out of the company if they're not capable of stepping up to our expectations."

Now is a great time for you to start thinking about a turnaround plan for your company's sales if they are lagging behind expectations. If your company is in a rapidly expanding market and you're showing growth that's slower than the market, it means that you're losing market share to your competition. If your company is in a flat market but you have outstanding opportunities in segment or niches of that market, a sales turnaround could mean refocusing your resources on those market segments where your best opportunities are. If your company's in a declining market, a sales turnaround could mean refocusing your company on new market segments or with new products that will allow you to boost your opportunities and get back on the path to growth. These are all things that you should think about as you think about a turnaround plan for your company's sales efforts.

Sales opportunity management is the key to improving results. A lot of companies struggle with identifying and prioritizing the best opportunities for them amongst their prospects and amongst the deals they're working on. Best in class companies do a great job at sales opportunity management by spending regular time analyzing their pipeline, analyzing each customer opportunity, and prioritizing the allocation of resources to make sure that those best opportunities can be focused on and converted into sales. A quick way to get organized is to have a top ten opportunity list for each of your sales reps, to bring that list to every sales meeting, and to get a regular update on what's being done to advance each of the sales on those top ten accounts. Many companies fail to do this, but it's a very easy tactic that can be used in order to bring greater visibility to the key accounts that are going to drive your business, and make sure that your sales reps are focusing their top attention on them.

A simple spreadsheet which is updated once a week by your sales reps and discussed at the sales meeting is a great way for you to do a top ten account review. Have your reps focus on those ten accounts every week and make sure that each week you're holding them accountable for showing some advancement on each of those accounts, and also planning what the next steps are to continue to advance the sales at those companies. By maintaining a top ten list for each of your sales reps, you'll show them that it's important for you to get visibility on the accounts that they're working on that are going to drive revenue and help them to achieve their sales quotas.

It will also get them into the mindset that they need to be focusing their time and energy on the best opportunities, as opposed to just turning out the sales activity. Lots of sales reps get overwhelmed by the volume of activity that they need to generate in order to do their jobs effectively. They get lost in activity and start to equate activity with productivity. Being productive in sales means being able to quickly qualify your best opportunities and focus your time and attention on moving those opportunities forward. By using an opportunity management system, such as the one we've suggested here, you can quickly make sure that your sales reps are giving primary focus to what's going to produce the sales that your company needs in order to accelerate its revenue growth.