Want better sales performance? It’s about time
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Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Archives
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September 6, 2011 7:45 AM
As any sales manager or CFO can attest, improving sales performance is a tough, time-consuming, task. You implement enabling technology. You recruit great sales skills. You gain access to valuable information. Your team uses these resources and tries hard. Yet, still, sales performance lags what everyone senses it could be. If only there were a way to improve the sales impacts of sales efforts.
Most would say the behavior of sales people is impossible to change. Seems like it might be time to try. In the tech sector, increased investments in sales and marketing have been accompanied in every year for the past nine years by declining margins. What must change? The effectiveness with which sales people spend their time.
To do so, we have to help sales people see the value in spending their time differently. Give them a radar system that guides them to call the right people at the right time on the right issues. Given how incredibly results-oriented sales people are, it stands to reason that when armed with such radar they will go on to produce better results. When sales people gain new ways to invest their efforts where effort’s most likely to have impact, they will learn to have more impact. When able to see that what they’re doing isn’t working, sales people will stop doing over and over again things which don’t work. They’ll gain the curiousity needed to try new tactics and the courage to abandon bad tactics. As one client put it to me this past week: “this approach is really interesting, and incredibly revealing.”
Armed with this kind of prospect radar, sales people discover the ‘hard fun’ of learning, at work.
They go on to make wise use of their time. It’s about time.
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Sincere thanks to colleagues whose ideas and feedback shaped this short trailer, including: Vanessa Fox, Don Perkins, RAG Media, John Holland, Tibor Shanto, Sharon Drew Morgan, Carl Moe, Andy Rudin, Nigel Edelshain, Howard Hodges, Joe Galvin, and Sharon Little.
| Blogger Profile: John Cousineau | |
| President, Innovative Information. Thirty years in operations research. Pioneer in internet-enabled business practices. Otherwise, just an ordinary guy. Read more about John Cousineau (PDF) |  |
