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Is It Your Salespeople or Your Sale Process?

By IsaiX | June 30, 2008

This article written by: Gil Cargill

Many business executives have questioned why their sales organizations have not been able to produce the results desired. Traditionally, the executive turns his/her attention towards the salespeople, wonder­ing whether or not they are properly trained, motivated, incited, etc. My experience, based on working with over 5,000 business-to-business sales forces, tells me that the culprit, more often than not, is the sales process that the organization is using.

It is a little known fact that the first documented sales training manual was written in 1873 by the founder of NCR, John H. Patterson. Patterson trained his salespeople to use a process that has become the de facto sales process for all business-to-business sales forces. Ironically, the process has not changed since 1873. The purpose of this article is to give you some insight into whether or not your process is helping your salespeople produce the results you desire or hindering them.

* Selling Time: Let’s look at the correlation between time and sales production. Selling time is a finite and extremely limited commodity. Your sales team only has eight hours a day to go out and find, acquire and keep customers. Many companies have reduced that amount of support available to the sales force in a flawed effort to lower costs. I call this effort flawed because, in taking administrative support away from the salesperson, you are inadvertently reducing their ability to produce revenue.

One of the first things you should do, if you are interested in investigating the impact your process make on your top and bottom lines, is to understand the way your salespeople spend their selling time. This can be easily accomplished by asking your sales team to log all of their activities on a quarter-hour basis for five days.

The average American business-to-business sales force spends approximately 34% of its day doing administrative work. 60% of that time is the result of a mistake made by someone other than the salesperson. This directly impacts the amount of time the salesperson has available to sell, and my research shows that the average salesperson spends approximately 29% of the day selling. Increase the amount of time available for selling and your salespeople will sell more.

* Prospecting: This is a time-honored process that is traditional in virtually all business-to-business sales forces. Unfortunately, prospecting “ain’t what it used to be”. The buyer’s world has changed such that prospecting, in today’s market, is extremely ineffective. The return on time investment, from the salesperson’s point of view, has gone down dramatically in the past two or three decades.

A far better strategy is to create a team of dedicated prospectors who do the initial calling into accounts to profile accounts and to ascertain the account’s interest in buying your products or ser­vices. Once the account is properly profiled and qualified, then and only then should a salesperson be assigned to the opportunity.

This deployment of your resources ensures that your sales force will have a nonstop supply of high-quality leads. This has a significant impact on morale, commissions paid to the sales team, as well as your profits. Again, the process is the culprit in this arena.

* Following Up: In today’s world, it is far more challenging to stay in touch with all of the decision-makers in a salesperson’s territory or market. This is due to the fact that the decision-makers in today’s world are busier than ever. Consequently, following up and staying in touch with these individuals is increasingly challenging.

At the same time that the pace of the world has increased, the insecurity of today’s decision-makers has gone up geometrically. These two phenomena conspire to dramatically reduce the ability of the sales professional to find, acquire and keep customers. Adequate levels of follow-up, utilizing tradi­tional methods, are virtually impossible as a result of these circumstances.

Consequently, I suggest that you implement a fully automated follow-up system, which relieves the salesperson of this burden and returns more selling time to the salesperson.

In closing, I would like to say that, in my opinion, when it comes to sales productivity problems, it is more than likely not your salespeople but rather your sales process. The process causes companies to overpay while their sales team is underperforming. Fix the process and your company will enjoy record growth, productivity and, most importantly, profitability.

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