Are You a Technology Sales Leader?....or a Laggard?

New for 2010, IDC has developed the Sales Performance Matrix to take an objective and quantitative approach to stratifying sales leaders and laggards. This matrix draws a direct correlation between a company’s sales operational efficiency and its effectiveness in execution in the marketplace. Our objective is to assess the key sales management priorities and actions taken that have led to excellence in results. The basis for this analsyis is IDC's annual Sales Productivity Benchmarks study coupled with insight from best practices studies and other research conducted by IDC's Sales Advisory Service. (note that the below figure represents larger organizations, with 70% of companies having $500M+ in revenue and an average revenue of ~$5B)

Measurement of a sales organization's efficiency is composed of four key attributes: Sales Investment; Sales Staff Efficiency; Maturity across IDC's Sales Productivity Levers; and Sales Infrastructure. Each attribute is composed of several key performance indicators that are derived through IDC Sales Advisory Service's research efforts, and provide indicators as to the level of maturity of the respective productivity attributes.

This Sales Performance Matrix certainly provides a great industry-level view of the maturity of companies' sales organizations as well as insight into best-in-class companies; however, the real value comes when we look at individual companies' sales productivity scorecards to assess their performance and drive recommendations for improvement. IDC's Sales Productivity Scorecards include analysis of all key performance indicators for each of the above-mentioned productivity attributes. For example, the below figure provides an industry-wide assessment of the gaps across just one of these attributes, IDC's sales productivity levers:

Do these industry challenges sound familiar? How effective has your organization been at deploying the above-mentioned strategies in response to some of these challenges? Please comment below to join the conversation or contact me at mgerard@idc.com. Sales Advisory Service clients can access additional frameworks, quantitative data and best practices recommendations and case studies to address their greatest sales challenges at www.idc.com/salesadvisory.

Please do contact me if you'd like to learn more about how we can leverage these frameworks and results from our recent Sales Productivity Benchmarks study for your organization.