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How much is a 2% increase in your company’s sales productivity worth in gross margin?
Millions? More? Could you be leaving money on the table? How effective is your sales organization? How do you know?
Are your sales reps productive enough?
Are your sales managers effective enough?
Does your sales organization enable or impede performance? Most companies don't begin to have an answer. Few executives and senior managers take a holistic view of the issue. They tend to be obsessed with revenue growth and focus most of their internal efforts on a few execution issues, at the expense of the effectiveness of the whole system. Could conventional wisdom be impeding your ability to challenge your sales execution?
Traditional biases:
• “We only hire seasoned sales people”
• “We invest heavily in training”
• “Selling is an art”
• “You can’t industrialize selling”
• “We’ve got the best products”
• “We’re making our numbers” All too often, some of these accepted views prevent executives from adopting a more industrial approach to executing their Go-To-Market strategy. This leaves the business over-dependent on the individual talent of a fraction of their people – and it isn’t scaleable.
How can you raise the performance of your sales people and managers? How can you maximize your sales organization’s productivity?
Many see the problem yet very few know how to create sustainable sales effectiveness at a structural level.
Other things (your brand image, offer, people, culture, strategy and funding, etc.) being equal, there are several levers you can use to boost sales results.
The most common mistake is to address one or two single issues.
Even by throwing a lot of resources and money at it, it will only have marginal effect on your business results: revenue, market share, margin or sales productivity. You may invest in sales skills training but if your value messages or your sales processes are not effective enough, your margins will not increase much. You may deploy CRM technology but if your demand generation activities do not generate a strong enough pipeline, or if your resellers do not effectively follow up leads, your sales will not increase much. You may rebalance your sales model between sales channels, but if each customer interaction does not have enough impact, your market share will not increase much. In your execution chain, 3 levels contribute to your business outcome:
Your organization which provides the field with direction, processes, methods and other forms of support
Your line management which reinforces application of the above and facilitates sales execution at field level
Your internal and external teams who manage customer and partner interactions The three levels in your execution chain have distinct roles and must reinforce each other, in order to form a coherent, interlocked, and effective system. If you want to go deeper into the subject,
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