CSM Sales Strategy & Planning 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which sales planning approach starts with a revenue goal and works backward to determine required activity levels?
- Bottom-up forecasting
- Top-down planning (Correct answer)
- Activity-based planning
- Pipeline coverage modeling
Correct answer: Top-down planning
Top-down planning begins with an executive revenue target and decomposes it into quotas, activities, and headcount requirements.
Question 2: A sales manager notices that win rates drop sharply when deals involve more than three decision-makers. What strategic adjustment is most appropriate?
- Avoid multi-stakeholder deals entirely
- Develop a champion-building playbook and multi-threading strategy (Correct answer)
- Lower pricing to offset complexity
- Extend the sales cycle budget
Correct answer: Develop a champion-building playbook and multi-threading strategy
Multi-threading—engaging multiple stakeholders through a coached internal champion—directly addresses win-rate erosion in complex buying committees.
Question 3: What is the primary purpose of a competitive displacement strategy?
- Lowering your price below competitors
- Targeting prospects already using a rival solution and converting them (Correct answer)
- Avoiding markets where competitors are strong
- Matching competitor feature sets exactly
Correct answer: Targeting prospects already using a rival solution and converting them
Competitive displacement focuses resources on stealing installed-base customers from rivals by highlighting differentiated value and switching cost offsets.
Question 4: A territory plan assigns higher quotas to reps covering accounts with the greatest total addressable market. This is an example of:
- Equal quota distribution
- Market-potential-based quota allocation (Correct answer)
- Activity-based quota setting
- Historical-trend quota rollover
Correct answer: Market-potential-based quota allocation
Market-potential-based allocation ties quota to the estimated revenue opportunity within each territory, incentivizing effort where upside is largest.
Question 5: When building an annual sales plan, which element should be defined BEFORE setting individual rep quotas?
- Commission payout schedules
- Company revenue target and growth assumptions (Correct answer)
- CRM configuration updates
- Marketing campaign calendars
Correct answer: Company revenue target and growth assumptions
The company revenue target and growth assumptions form the foundation from which quotas, headcount, and activity plans are derived.
Question 6: A 'land and expand' sales strategy is best described as:
- Winning large enterprise deals upfront with full deployment
- Securing an initial small sale then growing the account through upsell and cross-sell (Correct answer)
- Expanding the sales team headcount rapidly
- Entering multiple new geographic markets simultaneously
Correct answer: Securing an initial small sale then growing the account through upsell and cross-sell
Land and expand prioritizes a low-friction initial sale to reduce buying risk, then systematically grows the account value post-adoption.
Question 7: Which metric most directly measures how efficiently a sales team converts pipeline into closed revenue?
- Average deal size
- Pipeline coverage ratio
- Win rate (Correct answer)
- Sales cycle length
Correct answer: Win rate
Win rate (closed-won deals divided by total opportunities) is the direct measure of pipeline-to-revenue conversion efficiency.
CSM Sales Strategy & Planning 2
Which sales planning approach starts with a revenue goal and works backward to determine required activity levels?