In sales, what separates average performers from ebbed, and daily sales fell. To revitalize the business, distinctive ones is not just landing the perfect deal the company set up a win room to shift the team’s but being able to do it again and again. Leading mindset from reactive to proactive. Sales leaders sales organizations deploy three tactics. First, they established a small cross-functional team with clear use cross-functional “win rooms” (agile hubs where task owners, meeting structures, and dedicated deals get solutioned and continuously refined to resources that were guided by working principles fit customer needs) and constantly refine their (for example, that all decisions were to be made solutions to fit customer needs. Second, they invest in win-room sessions). They also introduced an in a narrow set of tools and technologies they accelerated approval process. The team focused actually need, but double down to ensure thorough on increasing the rate of experimentation around front- and back-end adoption, focusing on driving new campaigns and optimizing the conversion rate. customer outcomes instead of solving technology It set up dashboards to track both campaign and problems. Finally, they elevate the commercial sales-rep performance and incorporated frontline operations function into a clear strategic role feedback into campaign design. In just four weeks, and make it a true sales leader role in the overall the company had launched seven high-impact business. campaigns that led to a 30 percent increase in daily sales. Create cross-functional win rooms as the new standard Ensure the correct tech-stack intensity A win room brings together a cross-functional Many leading sales organizations find themselves team comprising people from sales and from a in a difficult situation—they subscribe to multi- combination of marketing, product, delivery, finance, million-dollar technology solutions designed to and technology (and other functions as needed), all make reps’ lives easier and to help management working together at a structured cadence to focus track performance. But they then realize that few on closing deals. Our research suggests that the salespeople are using them. Many are streamlining top-performing sales functions have embraced and their tech stack and adopting a more outcome- implemented this concept, bringing focus and rigor based approach to the problem to the sales process. “Sales tech” is booming—what was once a niche Although win rooms can be used for both large category dominated by a few customer relationship and small deals, the approach is slightly different management (CRM) players has proliferated into for each. For large deals, the focus is on creating dozens of subcategories, with private investment a perfectly tailored solution for a particular key in the sector soaring ~70% between 2020 and customer—the right design at the right price, with 2021. It’s also top of mind for sales leaders: around the right support level. For smaller deals, the focus is 80 percent of chief sales officers say that having on designing and testing different experiments and an effective sales tech stack is critical to hitting 7 scaling the ones that work well. Whichever approach revenue targets. is appropriate, it is essential that win rooms have clearly defined timelines, meeting cadence, roles, However, it can be complicated. Companies race to and agility. purchase technology solutions, only to see marginal productivity gains. Most sales organizations As an example, a financial institution launched a spend $500 to $1,000 per rep on sales tech, but new business unit and saw soaring sales for the barely more than half boast good technology adoption.8 first couple of months. But as the launch excitement For example, a Saas company invested faded, the sales team’s focus lapsed, momentum significantly in cutting-edge tools to enable the 7 “Taming the sales tech mayhem,” Gartner, 2021. 8 How to boost adoption rate of new technology,” Bigtincan, November 29, 2019. 22 Future of B2B sales: The big reframe