Let’s say you are ready to migrate to a team-based selling model. Now you have to decide about changes in your staff. What adjustments will you make? The primary goal is to have your field salespeople making four calls a day, twenty calls a week. If you currently have ten salespeople making two calls a […]
Three Tactics You Can Adopt Today to Improve Inside Sales Productivity
In addition to the sales process engineering changes that Levitt Safety made (see the Levitt Safety case study), they also implemented three tactical practices that directly improved the productivity of their inside salespeople. Direct sales supervision Levitt has learned that a manager for an inside sales group must provide lots of hands-on supervision. Instead of sitting in […]
Is Lack of Sales Training the Problem?
Many articles are written each year about the importance of sales training. Most of them assume that problems in sales can be fixed if salespeople are better trained. Yet it is worth asking these two questions: What problem do we address with sales training? Is training sufficient to solve it? Usually advocates of sales training identify […]
Should Sales Be Engineered from the Outside-In or the Inside-Out?
A story: Our company makes specialized pipe fittings. When our company first started, everybody worked at the main site down in the industrial district. Even the salespeople worked there behind a counter. Customers would stop by to pick up parts they needed. They could get answers to questions about problem situations and learn about new kinds of fittings. […]
How to Start Tracking your Critical Sales Metric: Meaningful Sales Interactions
Most advice about sales metrics treats the work of the salesperson as though it is a black box. These advisors recommend that sales managers track how much goes into the black box (open opportunities, deal size), how much comes out of the black box (closed opportunities, win rates) and how long opportunities spend inside the […]
Should Your Salespeople Be Prospecting?
Organizations that are starved for sales opportunities (which apparently is true for about 70% of companies) are tempted to put pressure on their salespeople to create more opportunities. They rationalize that since the salesperson’s job is to sell, the job also includes the work to find new prospects. Here’s the logic behind their argument. Because […]
What Are the Primary Objections to a Division of Labor in Sales?
In order to address the problem with underperformance in sales, we’ll have to challenge the assumption that autonomous sales agents should bear the primary responsibility of sales performance. This assumption, more than any other cause, is leading to significant underperformance in sales. If we challenge this assumption then we can divide the labor of sales—prospecting, selling, administration, solution […]
Why Is Sales Underperforming?
Most sales organizations report that they are underperforming. It’s not that sales is getting worse, it’s that other functions in the company like production and new product development have gotten so much better. Decade after decade, these functions continue to show dramatic productivity gains. In this article we’ll look at why sales organizations underperform and […]
What Is the Goal of the Sales Function?
Often we make assumptions about our lives that are so ingrained we never think to challenge them. The goal of the sales function is one of those assumptions. When asked the goal of sales, we first respond by saying “to sell as much as possible.” However, on closer examination in this article we’ll see that the […]
The Indicative Proposal, a Useful Tactic Early in the Sales Cycle
In a typical sales cycle, the goal is to engage the customer in conversation, uncover a need, and conduct a requirements discovery exercise. If all goes well, the requirements discovery will produce a request for a proposal. This proposal will outline what you will do and how much it will cost. However, often a customer […]