Tag Archives: Sales Optimization
Summit 2013 Highlights: Apply Productivity Analysis to Improve B-to-B Sales Results
- 9th May 2013
Time is the most valuable resource a sales rep has: “A salesperson has, typically, 50 hours in the week in which to work. It’s the job of both marketing and sales to ensure that those 50 hours are spent as productively as possible,” said Jim Ninivaggi, service director of Sales Enablement Strategies at SiriusDecisions, who spoke at Summit 2013 this morning. B-to-b organizations often struggle to keep reps focused on higher-yield activities that lead to closing deals and bringing in revenue. This was borne out by the results of an instant poll of the Summit 2013 audience: Only 1 percent of participants polled felt very confident that their reps are fully productive vs. 41 percent who are very confident that their reps are not fully productive.
Continue Reading....Four Proven Ways to Reach at Least 90 Percent Sales Quota Attainment
- 1st March 2013
How can you improve the performance of your b-to-b sales organization? Set higher quotas? Provide higher commissions or accelerators? Increase training? Hire more sales specialists or, perhaps, administrators? Which levers should you push and why? In the past, we have written about the clear relationship between pipeline-to-quota ratios and pipeline conversion ratios and pipeline velocity (3x-or-less pipelines have better conversion rates, while 4x-or-more pipelines have faster velocity, but that does not make up for the worse conversion rates). Analysis of our sales benchmark data reveals four interesting commonalities between b-to-b organizations that reported at least 90 percent annual quota attainment for their sales force.
Continue Reading....Sales Process, Methodologies, Models and Hybrids
- 1st February 2013
This Sunday, the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens will compete in the Super Bowl to determine the American football championship. While the respective coaches may come from the same family (Jim Harbaugh is the head coach of the 49ers while his brother John leads the Ravens), they deploy very different offensive systems. The 49ers use an offensive system called the “Pistol,” which includes many plays where the quarterback may be required to run with the ball. The Ravens utilize the “Vertical” offense, where the focus is on having the quarterback pass the football in precisely timed patterns to his receivers. These different offensive systems made me think of a common question I receive from our sales enablement clients. There seems to be some confusion as to the difference between sales process, sales methodology, and sales models – and often our enablement clients use them interchangeably. At the risk of overusing yet another sports analogy in sales, here’s how football can help explain the difference.
Continue Reading....Five New Year’s Resolutions for Sales Operations
- 10th December 2012
If there is one thing I can guarantee, it is that the holiday season – also the planning season for many sales organizations – will go by faster then we expect. I am not telling you this as a scare tactic, but to advise you to take some time to prepare for what the new year might bring. For many sales operations leaders, this means new year’s resolutions to continue driving sales productivity, make improvements to areas that did not perform well over the last 12 months and develop new processes to help sales reps work more efficiently. Easier said than done. My advice is to commit to the following five resolutions.
Continue Reading....Fifty Hours
- 14th August 2012
Fifty hours. That’s likely the average workweek for an average salesperson – though between travel and late nights writing proposals, filling out RFPs and rehearsing for presentations, it may be longer for your reps. Our job, in marketing and sales, can be boiled down to this: Together, how do we ensure that those 50 hours our reps have to spend in the pursuit of revenue are maximized for each and every salesperson? Ultimately, each rep is our means of production (i.e. sales and revenue) – and we want to make sure we are getting the maximum yield from them.
Continue Reading....Gamification: Motivator or Distractor?
- 28th June 2012
While some might argue that “having a job is reward enough,” many sales leaders and sales managers are always looking for ways to motivate their reps. Using gamification technology platforms to create competition is one way to do it. These applications create a point system that sales organizations can track within the sales force automation (SFA) system.
Continue Reading....Learning From Losing
- 25th April 2012
How many hours have sales operations leaders spent (or wasted) trying to get good data on lost opportunities? No doubt too many to calculate. However, what’s really important is that they don’t stop trying. The wealth of information for both sales and marketing that can be gathered from losing a deal is priceless. But the question still remains: How does sales operations increase the visibility of this buried treasure of information?
Continue Reading....Five Myths About Top-Down Planning
- 4th January 2012
Many B2B organizations are taking stock of their 2012 planning process. And many sales and sales operations leaders complain about why the top-down planning process does not work and results ...
Continue Reading....Your Reps Are Certifiable
- 5th December 2011
Sales enablement leaders often ask us how they can better measure whether their efforts are truly making an impact. While there are a number of ways to measure sales enablement, ...
Continue Reading....Reflections on Dreamforce ’11
- 9th September 2011
Just back from Dreamforce ’11, Salesforce.com’s (SFDC) annual multimedia bacchanalia of announcements and buzz — fueled by Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff’s charisma and energy. For any of us who ...
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