Our members are thinking hard about sales productivity. Some are scrambling to react to unexpected growth; others to cratering demand. Many are re-aligning sales organizations as markets around them change unpredictably.
They’re in turns exhilarated, terrified, or uncertain in the current economic environment, but their focus on making salespeople more productive is remarkably consistent across industries and firms. Here are five things that they're doing (and that they’ll be talking about at our upcoming conference).
Investing in front line sales management. Companies have wasted fortunes training salespeople. Many now realize that front line sales managers are the nexus for real change in sales organizations. Learning and development efforts focused on sales managers (like these, or these; or certification initiatives like ours) yield exponentially higher returns than sales training, at a fraction of the expense.
Leveraging technology. No function within the enterprise gains more by leveraging technology than the sales force. But sales leadership is later than almost all of their management peers to anticipate technology’s impact. If you’re not proactively investing in social media, mobility, analytics, and the web to cut selling expense, speed up the sales process, enable your sales force, and improve your customers’ experience, you can bet that your competitors are. Even if you’re not worried about your competitors’ new sales platform, you’d better be worried about your old one. (It’s on fire.)
Coaching salespeople. Coaching just sounds like a great idea. Which might be why everyone says their sales organization values coaching. They’d be wrong: our research shows that most firms who say their sales managers coach, aren’t coaching at all. But for those that do, the returns are profound, and the advantages strategic. It’s the best idea to come to the practice of sales management, maybe ever, and it’s basically free. The best coaching programs use practical tools, and a simple idea: that coaching is fundamental to performance management.
Managing process. Great sales forces manage selling as a process. Great managers consider process discipline as important to their career as any other competency. Research from people like this, and leading sales management training solutions like this make a compelling point: implement even a poor process, and improve it as you go, and you’ll outrun every other sales force that doesn’t have a coherent approach to sales process management. Which is to say, almost all of them.
Clearing things up. Salespeople just want to take the hill. If they’re not achieving, there’s every chance in the world it’s your fault – not theirs. For many organizations providing clarity of task, and clarity of role for salespeople is the simple medicine that makes the most difference. Clear things up by focusing on the performance metrics that matter most, organizing jobs coherently, deploying efficiently, and designing simple tools that communicate performance quickly.
