Today’s B2B sales function isn’t just more competitive than ever, it’s infinitely more complex.

A look at Accenture’s Fast-Track to Future-Ready Performance report, which surveyed 1,100 C-suite and senior executives, shows that sales is viewed as one of the most important functions for fueling and achieving operational growth—and critical for achieving operational maturity.

Sales organizations require a new model that can scale globally, deliver better customer experiences and increased profitability. By bringing together human talent and technology sales organizations can innovate and pivot at the same speed as their customers.

To have a future-ready organization, you need a future-ready sales function. It is the Sales function that can lead the entire operation forward, charting the path toward a future of operational excellence.

The journey begins here and now.

Our global, cross-industry research demonstrates the connection between business operations maturity and performance. The research, shows that there are four levels of operational maturity: stable, efficient, predictive and future-ready.

Future-readiness in the sales function is a goal worth striving toward.
Future-ready sales teams run circles around the competition with their overall agility and scalability, and drive superior revenue and business outcomes:

• Data orchestration across marketing, sales and service enables relevant, personalized customer experiences.
• Extensive, integrated applied intelligence drives conversions.
• Real-time sales results inform product innovation that drives repeat business.

The sales function is ahead of other functions’ uses of several technologies key to operational maturity and many sales organizations have the teams, tools and data to get started on the journey.

Future-ready sales operations are also future-proof.

They extract more value from recurring business that’s ultimately more profitable in the long term, and are also uniquely positioned to capitalize on opportunities of every size. All deal sizes matter, and smarter operations can lead sellers to them.

The path to becoming future-ready is a journey well worth taking, and the operational model has to fit the sales organization as well as it fits the customers. That’s why each sales organization must take a unique approach toward attaining future-readiness.

The sales function can only be as successful as its operational maturity, and the same goes for the enterprise. Since sales owns the customer relationships and drives revenue, this function should set an operational maturity paradigm that the rest of the organization can follow so the future is defined by accelerated growth.