“ a lot of the sales practices apply in many sales strategies, especially B2B. I learnt from an early mentor who told me: “Talk to decision-makers”. It’s the most common sense and logical piece of advice, however, it has been a challenge through my whole career in managing sales teams.”

From your client list, establish the top 20% based on the potential opportunity (not historical opportunity because it is “history”). Develop an account plan for each. • The Key Competencies of a Successful Strategic Account Manager include commercial awareness, communication skills, ethics, results-oriented and problem-solving.

The best sales professionals are outstanding at intensive farming of a territory.

The best sales leaders apply a comprehensive territory management plan across their team. • Have a communicated rule on how often key accounts need to be engaged.

At some stage, some focus for a founder wishing to build a business will be a comprehensive and professional sales function. If this is executed competently, then the sales function will be able to deliver the orders necessary to achieve the strategic revenue plan.

Before adding the additional cost of sales support, it can be more cost-effective to provide necessary training and sales automation tools to enable the sales professional to be more productive.

All salespeople are not created equal.

Over a recent coffee in Sydney’s CBD area with a small business owner, I discussed her strategies for compensating her high performers. Her retention strategy for pillar leaders was to give them equity and pay them, on target, 50% above the market. On further exploration, she revealed how fearful she was of other key members leaving the organisation. However, despite showering this leadership team in gold, there had been a recent defection. There was shock and self-recrimination on what should have been done better to retain this “key” leader in the organisation.

Being able to select a young red wine full of tannins and fruit and predict its greatness in 10 + years hence is an art. To the uninitiated, the wine could be almost undrinkable. However, to a trained and experienced wine drinker a relatively easy thing to accomplish.

Similarly, choosing your leadership team members from existing managers and staff is an art. The experience will make you better, but at first, there will be missteps. We all know that many great individual contributors cannot make the step up to management. In the same way, many managers cannot make the step up to be leaders.

The oft. neglected step in an organisation’s succession planning is an adequate preparation program for a new manager. There is a lot written about the importance of leadership and the differences between a manager and a leader. However, a reasonable and challenging first step is for an individual contributor to step up and manage a team.

Setting up the sales culture involves the provision of a CRM, sales training and KPI dashboards.

The focus should be on sales process automation and effective use of sales time.

Referring to the strategic plan: be clear about what you are selling and what is not being sold.

Visualize what your business looks like in 3 ~5 years.

• What will you be doing?

• What will be your business legacy?

• How will you measure the progress?

• Will you still be the owner?

• What is your strategic plan?

• Are you growing the business for the experience, challenge and reward of growing and managing a larger business?

For more than 15 years the European futurist Gerd Leonhard has been writing about the impact of technology on humans. He has challenged businesses to look into the future and spend more time strategising with an open mind about the impending changes to the technology landscape and how best to adapt. Leonhard’s approach has always been a proactive, positive endeavour with a problem-solving process that sets organisations up in a prepared way and ready for adaptation.

In a recent interview with a CEO and APAC country manager, I learned that she had a manager who visited the country regularly and spent a lot of 1:1 time with her. I asked the CEO if this was a threatening or micro-managing style. The response from the CEO was that, initially, she thought it would be like that, but in reality, she was learning a lot from her manager, he was a great leader and mentor. She had a lot of respect for him and appreciated the time with him.

Carlo’s diverse business experience has been with leading companies across FMCG, pharmaceutical, chemical, logistics, banking and government. Roles include sales & marketing, HR, and general management. He has also consulted and coached executives and held board appointments. Strategic business and organisation development are strong interests.

A modest and quietly spoken CEO of a fast-growing FMCG I am working within SE Asia was recently bemoaning the fact that all functions in his business were not pulling in the same direction and this was starting to limit the business growth rate. It was clear from our discussion that this company has a clear Mission, Vision, Core Values and Strategy.

Consider the business challenge of a CEO for a fast-growing consumer business in South East Asia. Over the last five years, they have enjoyed a successful ride with impressive growth year on year that exceeded their company’s mid-term plan.

Deciding on the company culture is the precursor for selecting and developing leaders. The process must be decided or owned by the CEO. It must project into the company values, talent acquisition, onboarding and compensation and benefits.

In this chapter, we'll consider that many companies have a mission and vision statement. However, the degree to which this is communicated, and the resultant engagement in the organization can be very different from these typically bold statements. Also that the CEO or managing director is responsible for regularly communicating the company mission and vision.

In this chapter, we will consider what is your passionate personal goal for scaling new heights. And that a period of business stagnation is common for most successful businesses. And also that scaling a business requires an engaged team which understands the journey on which they are joining with you. Many clients I meet have established successful businesses. However, in some cases, the businesses have started to stagnate in growth. For a successful entrepreneur who is used to things going more to plan, the stagnation can create frustration.

Craig Saphin is a successful, experienced and articulate business leader. He has devoted the time and energy required to write this book and provide his structured business strategy framework to a wider audience. He deals with small and medium business owners daily and he loves it, they will all benefit from this book.