- U.S. companies spend over $900 billion on their sales forces, which is three times more than they spend on all ad media.
- Sales is, by far, the most expensive part of strategy execution for most firms. Yet, on average, companies deliver only 50% to 60% of the quota and bottom line financial performance that their strategies and sales forecasts have promised.
- More than half of executives (56%) say that their biggest challenge is ensuring that their daily decisions about sales strategy and resource allocation are in alignment with their companies’ strategies. That’s a lot of wasted money and effort.
From these results, a broad story emerges...
- Senior leaders have a better relative understanding of the company’s direction than sales reps, but are concerned that they don’t have the right sales processes and people.
- Salespeople are confident in their abilities to execute, but admit they have little understanding of the strategic direction, and its implications for their behavior, at their respective companies.
To add to that, the groups are far apart on basic elements such as recruiting, hiring, training, and role alignment. You can see why a simple statement —“I’m from Corporate (or I'm a Sales Consultant"), and I’m here to help you”— is one of the oldest jokes in many firms.
If and when leaders want to make changes, misalignment sets up a costly and frustrating cycle.
- The sales force gets better and better at things that leaders and customers value less and less while remaining unclear about their own performance expectations.
- Companies fail to get the most out of the $12 billion a year they spend on sales enablement tools and the $ billions more on CRM technology.
- And hiring the right candidates also becomes a problem, especially as new buying processes, driven by online technologies, reshape selling tasks. If information isn’t flowing between senior execs and front-line customer-contact people, both sales management and the senior team management won’t be able to keep up with the new skills and sales tasks they should be hiring for.
We've seen this rodeo 100's of times....
The very good news is that there are direct solutions to what has been consistently defined as The #1 Management Problem for the past five years by most CEOs in B2B companies:
"I need to improve the productivity of my salespeople this year"
- We proactively together take apart your current sales processes
- We collaboratively tighten up your current sales tools and point out what you're missing
- We create new approaches to your waterfall math, your metrics and how you use your data
- We do a quick assessment in real time on your CMS, CRM and other sales tech tools
- We dissect your "Command of Message", "Value Propositions" and "Checklist" tools
It's a unique, fast-paced, somewhat exhausting and very energizing way to spend a day, which leaves you with a details blueprint for moving head.
If you're interested,just click here to learn more, or just email me at jack@derbymanagement.com to set up a time to talk through a few ideas.
Best of Success in finishing February on plan !
Derby Management...for 25 years
-Sales & Marketing Productivity Experts
-Business & Strategy Planning Specialists
-Senior Management Coaches for CEOs & VPs
Boston, MA 02117
Jack's Cell: 617-504-4222
jack@derbymanagement.com