Over 50% of sales reps are insufficiently prepared for customer meetings- 47% of buyers are dissatisfied with the quality and value of information from IT vendors
- Sales reps are unable to put aside the generic sales pitch to have deeper conversations with their prospects/customers
- Sales reps don't know when to bring the right people to the table (i.e., from their organization) at the right time
And what are sales organizations plans for customer interactions in the next 6 to 12 months?
- "We need to get our sales reps to spend more time in front of prospects."
- Sales organizations want to increase the time reps spend directly interacting with customers by 20%. [IDC's 2010 Sales Barometer study]
Part of working smarter is investing more time and resources into helping sales reps better prepare for customer interactions. IDC research indicates that only 17% of rep time is spent on activities related to 'preparing for customer interaction'. We can argue about the value of data that comes from time motion studies that are the source of this type of data or even how much time a rep should really spend here, however, the main point is that the quality of time spent preparing for customer interaction is poor. This provides an ideal opportunity to improve sales productivity.
Where to start? Talent management and sales methodology are certainly two areas to evaluate. Other areas of opportunity and investment that have historically been neglected include sales enablement and customer intelligence. Although we have a long way to go, much progress has been made in the past 12-18 months in the area of sales enablement. Customer intelligence (CI), on the other hand, has yet to leave the starting blocks.
Some questions to ask regarding your CI capabilities include:
- Who is accountable for CI in your organization? The importance of CI to the sales organization requires sales operations to take a leading role in ensuring that this productivity lever receives the attention that it deserves.
- Is there one source of truth for sales reps to access customer purchase and relationship history?
- How easy is it for sales reps to leverage CI information as part of their standard sales process - both internally developed and externally sourced information? (e.g., CI embedded within your SFA of record)
- Are you leveraging more sophisticated CI analysis? (e.g., share-of-wallet information, up-sell tools)
2 comments:
Hi Michael,I am not sure that sales reps can spend too much time in front of customers, since this is what we pay them for! But I do agree that all too often that time is ill spent; not just because they are unprepared, but actually because they just do not have the intrinsic competencies to do the job effectively. Our findings from large numbers of sales talent assessments that we have run all around the world are showing similar themes: sales people are generally well trained in a few areas of skill and behavior (typically those that are taught on the classic 'sheep dip' training courses). These have been drummed into sales people over and over again. Yet there are a large number of very key areas where sales people's skills and behaviors are consistently well below what could be considered as 'competent for their role' - including fundamentals such as 'Listening skills'; 'Realizing benefits'; 'Satisfying the Customer' and many more.
I think what we are seeing has a direct correlation to your findings. We are finding that sales people in close to 80% of assessments carried out are lacking a number of very fundamental skills and behavioral competencies. Maybe the reason they fail to bring in people at the right time, or struggle to get 'off script' is a direct consequence of these areas of weakness.
Additionally, and perhaps even more shocking are our findings which show that very few sales people are in a role that best plays to their strengths! Many are in roles that they have been put into, often just because that was the vacancy at the time. This 'wrong person, wrong role' compounds any inherent flaws and multiplies their effect significantly.
I would therefore contend that whilst there is no doubt that improved sales effectiveness tools are critical to a business, they are next to useless if the sales talent is unable, or untrained in how to get the most from them.
Keep up the great work with your research.
Andrew Dugdale
President
SalesAssessment.com
Well "said" Andrew. Thanks for your comment and valuable insight.
Much of what you're referring to falls in the Talent Management lever of sales productivity. And there is certainly much opportunity here for improvement as you've apparently seen and experienced first hand.
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