You price such that you know you are achieving the maximum customer value while extracting that value into revenue. You only reward discounts for specific customer behavior such as trial, growth and volume.

You provide thought leadership to your stakeholders including customers, users, investors and employees. The thought leadership is published and sets the market aiding in preselling your brand and products.

You embrace technology and automation. You use these to improve the customer experience and value chain. Your cutting-edge technology innovation is beta tested. You use agile approaches.

Your marketing, sales and go-to-market plans are co-owned by sales, marketing and product fulfillment departments. Your revenue/marketing plan puts a priority on Value Creation, Volume and Velocity for maximum market effect. Your plans include specific things the organization will stop doing that no longer meet these needs.

You have created a one-page elevator speech for important products and services. This clarifies exact language that discriminates us against our competitors. This exact language is consistently used in all customer communications from sales to advertising. 

Your development approaches are agile. There is a continuous improvement mentality – even with cash cow products and services. Your quality measurements are steeped in the value drivers that have been clarified are important to your customers.

There is a NPD process that is inclusive to include customers and all departments. You innovate to meet changing customer needs and purposefully displace your own current offering with items of higher value.

You have value measurements and margin metrics for every product or service you offer. You proactively optimize the portfolio – eliminating underperforming products and services. You proactively migrate customers to higher value products and services when those come online.

You have developed a brand with a promise of future performance delivery. You manage our brand to meet our company vision and mission. 

You use a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats tool for your company and your competitors that is objective and up-to-date. The organization uses this tool to improve your offerings.

Your team can articulate what differentiates your products/ services from those of your competitors and communicates these in your sales and marketing efforts.

You understand the difference between customer and end-user. You understand and embrace the differences and needs of buying teams, buying influencers and purchasing decision makers.

Your sellers focus on customer stakeholders who are willing and able to make change happen. This can include buying influencers, not just buyers. Your organization does not simply focus on titles, roles, or traditional definitions of advocacy.

You use and celebrate the certification of learned knowledge and skills for products, services, customer segments and sales approaches. Skill certification is based on the observation of long-term customer value creation.

You analyze high-performer behaviors to build competency models of the required skills for different sales roles. These models are fundamental to recruitment, training, promotion, and development efforts.

You have adopted a coaching culture that builds and sustains skills. All managers are held accountable for coaching frequency, time, and quality.

You meaningfully differentiate and celebrate the behaviors of high sales performers, ensuring broad adoption from other sellers. Rewards and consequences for following these performance standards are fair and clear.

Your organization has aligned your sales channels with how customers want to buy and with their purchasing power. This includes field sales, inside/tele, customer care upsell, partner sales and e-sales channels.

Your organization manages product and service offerings to match best channel performance using a long-term profit-maximizing method. Incentives applied at the channel level are based on margin not revenue.

Your organization has designed a replicable sales process fundamentally based on how your customers' typically purchase from us and validated by how our highest performers sell. This process is well adopted.

You have structured processes to collaborate with customers and build joint account plans. These plans create value for both the customer and our business.

Key customer accounts clearly understand they have access to your scarcest resources in exchange for helping grow your business. You up/down-tier accounts based on account performance.

Your organization understands the difference between BD and sellers. You embrace the longer sales cycles resident in an optimal BD function..

Your organization manages sales productivity while caring for the sales rep’s desire for creativity. You use a variety of methods such as canvass kick-offs, spurts, celebrations and customer testimonials to maintain cadence and offer recharge events.

You have identified the drivers of business success. You include focus on metrics to achieve value creation, volume and velocity. You also use sales metrics that include loyalty, retention and margin. Individuals receive appropriate dashboards allowing them to take clear action to drive these business outcomes.

Your organization recognizes that many in sales are ‘coin-operated’. Your sales compensation plans are simple and weighted to include doing what’s right for the customer and company margin.

Your organization meaningfully and measurably contributes to the ability of our sales organization to close quickly and serve our customers effectively. Your sales systems are not overly complex. Your sales productivity systems are designed to encourage customer touches with solution selling and insight selling techniques.

Your advertising and communications are authentic. Your strategic brand communication represents an overarching level of performance and future promises. For your product marketing, the organization promises what it will deliver and then delivers on this promise. Your messaging leads all your stakeholders to your unique differentiators.

Your CRM system provides value to your business and to your customers. The organization recognizes and safeguards against the damage an inefficient CRM system can have on both customer and employee morale.

You allocate your advertising and communications media spending based on a clear understanding of the returns on investment from each of the different elements in the mix. You use sentiment goals and tracking for all communications.

Your organization sets strategic financial goals based on market assessments, not on internal financial goals. Your organization knows the historic and trended growth performance of the top five market leaders in our industry.

You set challenging, yet fair, goals across our organization. You forecast at least quarterly by using objective customer reactions. Your sales team reports at least quarterly against these goals with a likely to win-capture metric.

Your organization rapidly identifies and diagnoses root causes of customer problems, then aggressively mobilizes resources to take corrective action. You see customer problems as opportunities to learn.