Sales Benchmarking for Success: Know Where You Stand

What is Sales Benchmarking?

Sales benchmarking allows sales leaders to compare their organization's sales trends, structure, investments, and effectiveness against industry leaders and peers. It’s not just about seeing where you rank –it’s about uncovering opportunities for improvement. If you see your organization is underspending on sales tools compared to your peers, you can now make a case for increasing spending on support tools – with the data to back up your request. 

Why It Matters:

• Provides a clearer understanding of your competitive positioning in the market
• Highlights key competitive strengths that must be maintained and opportunity gaps that need to be addressed
• Justifies investments in eCommerce, sales tools, and personnel with data-driven insights

How to Implement:

• Leverage industry surveys and reports to gather comparative data.
• Use benchmarking tools like the newly launched Kinetic12 SalesLAB™ Sales Benchmarking program to identify actionable insights to optimize sales effectiveness.
  

Thoughtful and Disciplined Account Planning: Win with Strategy

What (Really) is Account Planning?

Account planning goes beyond fulfilling customer needs – it involves tailoring strategies to help your customer succeed. These strategies are based on deep insights about your customers’ business, ensuring your sales efforts embrace activity that will make your customers most successful. Simply meeting your customers’ stated needs is table stakes; strategic account planning allows you to go a level deeper and uncover insights that will help your customers win with their customers. 

Why It Matters:

• Strategic account planning builds stronger, more collaborative customer relationships, and boosts sales by increasing customer retention and product penetration. 
• Improves sales forecasting and long-term planning
• Increases internal cross-functional alignment with your customers’ marketing, R&D, and operations teams and broadens relationships beyond your customers’ category and procurement contacts

How to Execute:

• Leverage research and data to identify insights relevant to your customer
• Develop clear action plans with measurable objectives
• Create regular touchpoints with your customers, collaboratively reviewing and adapting plans based on performance and market shifts
  

Empowering Your Sales Team: The Key to Sustainable Success

A great sales organization is built on a well-equipped, well-trained team. Leaders must ensure that their teams have access to the right tools, data, and a culture of continuous improvement. Imagine this: a foodservice equipment company adopted AI sales forecasting to predict demand during the holiday season. Armed with real data, its sales reps can now proactively reach out to clients without fear of stockouts, earning long-term customer loyalty. 

How to Empower Your Team:

• Equip your team with modern sales tools like CRM, sales analytics and intelligence platforms and AI sales forecasting models that enhance your sales team’s efficiency.
• Foster a culture of collaboration across your sales team and with cross-functional partners, encouraging goal alignment and sharing of best practices. 
• Use your CRM system as a relationship-building tool, not just a sales tracker
• Leverage data and analytics to identify trends and drive proactive sales efforts

Getting Started: Turning Insights into Action

• Sales leaders who are looking to optimize performance should:
• Start with a diagnostic assessment to identify their team’s strengths and weaknesses
• Collaborate across departments (sales, marketing, R&D) to align strategies
• Set measurable KPIs for benchmarking, account planning, and team empowerment

By combining benchmarking, disciplined account planning, and team empowerment, sales leaders can build a resilient, high-performing foodservice sales organization –one that is ready to thrive in 2025 and beyond.