Sales Survey - What's Missing?

"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have." 

-- Emile Chartier, Philosopher

 

A recent survey of sales management worldwide, conducted by Qvidian, found the following regarding the issues surrounding growing their business and the struggles of their sales organization.

Sales people struggle with the following:

• Effectively Present Value
• Providing Content Specific to Selling Situation & Buyer Stage
• Differentiate From Competition
• Generating Winning Proposals and Personalized Selling Documents
• Clearly Understand Customer's Buying Process
• Identify and Gain Access to All Decision Makers
• Conducting Thorough Needs Analysis

Top Areas That Need Improvement

While all of these are essential, there is a common theme that continues to surface. Sales teams are burdened with complexity and follow up in the selling process, and struggle to present greater value to the customer, leading to the buyer not making a decision. Reasons why value is often not presented effectively include:

• Sales not leveraging selling content and resources specific to buyer needs in order to convey value.
• Content and resources often not aligned to buyer stages.
• Sales spending too much time searching for content and resources, leading to less time selling.
• Selling content goes unused creating wasted resource time creating more and more content.
• Opportunities are missed because of wasted resources and less time selling.

Wasteful Activities

This study also uncovered that the majority of organizations haven't identified the wasteful activities in the sales cycle, let alone the wasted energy from resources generating quality content and tools that never get utilized. Only 7% believed their organization was able to identity wasteful activities, while over 31% said they were not able to identify at all. When it comes to leveraging the mass arsenal of content and selling tools, a staggering 90% of selling content is never used in the selling process. Our studies show 58% of salespeople's time is spent on non-selling activities. 58%!!!!

Agility

The ability for most sales organizations to be agile and adapt to change also impacts overall sales execution. 47% report that their sales process is only somewhat or not at all adaptable to change in the buying process, and over 57% state their sales organization is only somewhat or not at all agile.

Finding needed resources or creating personalized selling documents remains an ongoing challenge for salespeople. Over 39% say they have a challenge with locating and tailoring personalized selling documents and 16% say it is overly difficult.

Opportunities

The reality is buyers have changed, selling processes are more complex, and sales teams have not transformed, making it more of a challenge to achieve the organization's desired business outcomes. With all of these challenges, increasing complexity in the selling process, and critical business objectives and defined strategies, companies have invested in a variety of areas to help support their sales teams.

Typical actions taken to resolve these challenges:

• More Training - However 87% of training content is forgotten within weeks
• More Content - 70% of buyers are halfway in their buying decision before content is presented
• More Sales Reps - It is hard to find more great salespeople and 58% of the time is not spent selling

The Solution

One solution that is working for my clients is the move to fewer sales people, keeping the best and teaming them with sales coordinators. This is LESS BUT BETTER. A sales coordinator teamed with a great salesperson can more than double sales at ¾ the cost of two salespeople. One company had 5 salespeople - they moved to 2 salespeople and 2 sales coordinators and doubled their sales overall!

How is that possible? When you take a great salesperson and ask them to spend 58% of their time doing non-sales activities what do you expect? The more they prospect, the more follow up they have to do, and the less they prospect the next week. The more customers they converse with, the more follow up they have to do, meaning less conversations the next week.

 

With a sales coordinator working as a teammate, all of the non-sales follow up, quotes, letters, reporting, CRM input, appointment making etc. is taken care of by the coordinator and the salesperson's job becomes 90% sales conversations and developing relationships. This is what they are good at and why they were hired in the first place.

It also provides solutions to the issues in the survey above. Ensuring content and sales and marketing tools are being effectively used. The coordinator becomes the expert and ensures the salesperson has the right tools in hand on each call.

For more info see this flow chart -- it is an example of how the process might work in your company. 

For more information on this concept please feel free to contact me.