Sales Performance Improvement

When something is not right, the pain points we recognise first and seek to address are often only symptoms. 

Some typical pain points:

• The sales team are struggling to meet their targets.
• We need new customers but marketing initiatives are not getting the response we need.
• Sales training effects are short-lived or negligible.
• The new sales people we recruited are not living up to their promise.
• Our competitors are winning more of the deals.

Individual symptoms, addressed in isolation can give short term relief but rarely provide a lasting result.  Let's look at some examples -

Sales Training: 

Kevin Young, General Manager EMEA, Skillsoft  suggested (in his April 2011 article “Optimising Staff Training” on the BCS website) that for many organisations their training programme delivers little long-term value to the business - simply because employees fail to apply what they’ve learnt in a classroom environment to their daily role, whereas the potential is there for “an individual’s productivity levels to increase by eight per cent if they can apply their training to their role. That equates to 160 hours of additional output, or roughly 20 days per year”.

Why then would an organisations consider training as the primary solution to performance issues and but do little to change the environment the trainee returns to; an environment which at best ignores and may even hamper rather than support their newly acquired skills?

Sales Recruitment:

Have you ever found that the sales person who came with good recommendations, failed to meet their targets, left, and in their next role was once again successful?

Would it be more economical if you had an objective match between candidates and job profiles to aid selection and increase the probability of a recruit who could succeed in your organisation with your proposition?

Prospect Lists:

Does your CRM system have many contacts but few prospects resulting in business?
Are the sales force tardy or reluctant to update the CRM after each call or meeting due to the "admin overhead" which gives them little perceived return? 

Would they be more efficient if the sales force had a better gauge on where their hottest prospects might be?

Closing Deals:

Is the conversion rate of proposals into deals as high as you would like? 
Are your customers tough negotiators?

Would your sales force be more effective if they could build a better rapport with their contacts and deliver proposals which are hard to refuse?