OREANDA-NEWS. May 27, 2016. I always ask myself why I enjoy working on sales topics so much. I think it's because in sales you can’t hide from your results and your results are what drives growth in your company. However, market trends are changing how companies get those results. Uneven growth rates, sophisticated buyers and the tidal wave of digital technologies are all changing how customers buy and how companies sell.

Amid these trends, winning companies still get in front of the right customers and opportunities, with the right resources and channels, with the perfect offer and pitch each and every time – executing consistently across customers, accounts, geographies. Our research for Sales Growth revealed five strategies they deploy.

1. Find growth before competitors do

Skate where the puck is going, as they say in hockey. Focus too much on where the business is today and you’ll be knocked out tomorrow. Be where the opportunity will be next year and the year after. Find those opportunities and align resources accordingly. A majority of faster-growing companies invest more than 4 percent of their budget in opportunities more than a year out.

2. Sell the way customers want

Sales people can’t simply show up and bring information, they need to bring insights that are not widely available and connect those to needs. Digital technologies enable this, and digital channels make it even easier to understand what customers want, but understanding customers also means helping channel partners make use of insights, being nuanced in emerging markets, and investing in key account management.

3. Supercharge your sales engine

Sales operations are often the first thing to get cut in a downturn but the best-performing companies invest heavily in sales ops: typically one sales ops person for every person in the field. The backend IT architecture is also critical and doesn’t have to be crippling. I’ve deployed cloud-based sales planning apps at clients that are up and running in less than a month and require relatively small capital commitment. Marketing and sales need to be best friends: marketing needs to be able to help sales in the form of either the right collateral at the proposal stage, or lead generation and demand generation. I  regularly tell clients that they won’t be able to transform the performance of the sales force without transforming the capabilities of their sales operations.

4. Focus on your people

To drive sales excellence the right people have to deliver the right pitch time and again. In my experience, the best model is one where a central organization leads performance management, and where there’s a relentless focus on coaching. Finding the right people is getting harder than ever though. Almost 60% of companies in our research say they don’t have the right sales talent and capabilities for the future. We have a tool called sales DNA that allows us to correlate salesforce performance with salesforce characteristics. One of the top predictors? Curiosity. If you are genuinely interested in your customers you’ve a much higher chance of making the sale. Curiosity means more questions and more questions leads to more data and more data improves your chances even further.

5. Lead sales growth

The final strategy we see moves from the what to the how. Transforming sales means changing how you work, not just parachuting in new ideas. Change like this requires top-down direction and leadership alignment. Clear vision and strategy and leadership commitment are consistently ranked as the most important factors in the success of a sales transformation. The salesforce needs to feel empowered, but it needs to know what it is striving for. Constantly reinforcing the need for change is essential.

Sales is all about posting the results. These five strategies mean that the best companies keep posting the results as the world around them evolves.

I’ll be sharing more insights on this topic at the Sales Machine Conference NYC 16, presented by Salesforce and Sales Hacker. Register now and get an exclusive 35% discount from myself using this link here.

Bertil Chappuis is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Silicon Valley office, and leads the global sales and channel management practice. He is also a long-standing leader in high tech, telecommunications, and media and entertainment practices, and has served many leading companies across the enterprise IT landscape, including software, hardware, and service providers. He has led several major, multiyear corporate transformations, including some of the largest sales transformations in the high-tech industry. He has deep expertise and experience in all aspects of go-to-market strategy, organization, and operations. Chappuis is a thought leader and frequent author who regularly speaks at industry forums.