At the Sales 2.0 conference (http://www.sales20conf.com/), Michael Bosworth of Customer Centric gave a very interesting final presentation entitled “Customer Centric Selling in a Sales 2.0 World.” You can watch Mr. Bosworth’s presentation by visiting this website.
Please note that this data is owned by Customer Centric Systems, LLC., and I share it as it will promote Mr. Bosworth’s company.
Here are ugly statistics from Sales Benchmark Index:
•13% of an organization’s salespeople generate 87% of its revenue
•25% of salespeople do not generate enough revenue to cover their expenses to the company
•40% of salespeople lose their jobs every year
Mr. Bosworth recommends companies integrate around the customer, consisting of a Organization Sales Process, Best Practice Selling Behavior and Customer Centric Messaging.
Where are the core problems?
•“No agreement on what constitutes a “qualified” lead”
•“Marketing determines what the customer needs based on product development, but without input from Sales”
•“Marketing develops tools sales people don’t use”
Up to 90% of collateral created by marketing is never used by sales
– American Marketing Association
•“Sales and Marketing use different descriptions of products”
•“Sales and Marketing position different products to different users”
•“Sales has no repeatable process”
•“’Finger pointing’ when objectives are not met”
•“Wasted resources”
He says to get your VP of Sales and your VP of Marketing with their staffs in a room for 2-3 hours to hammer out sales messaging. Then use technology to deliver those messages to sales in a just in time manner. For a good product to do this, please visit http://www.landslide.com/.
To view the presentation yourself, please visit http://sales20conf.vportal.net/ You can actually see all the presentations there.
Good luck and good selling.
Google+
Jeff Ogden
Hi Jeff,
I agree with you. The statistics are pretty ugly. Unfortunately they aren’t getting better. CSO Insights reported that the average tenure of a VP of Sales was 21 months. This isn’t because they’re doing such a good job that they are retiring to an island in the Pacific.
When you look at typical companies in different sectors, you’ll see that sales generally lags behind other departments in the employment of processes (think Toyota Production System for the auto industry), measurement (Six Sigma), standards (GAAP, ISO 9000…), etc.
Sales leaders, many of whom arose from the ranks of field sales forces, often shun a longer-term, disciplined, strategic approach to sales performance improvement. Instead, too many seek a silver bullet or some shortcut to sales effectiveness, such as CRM.
The research for our recently released 2008 Sales Training Vendor Guide provided us with more insight into how VPs of sales make decisions. Many of them choose sales training providers based upon gut feel, whom they had used ten years ago, or those whose new book they had just read. A comprehensive and objective requirements definition matched to vendor capabilities wasn’t even a consideration.
When hiring, CEOs need to understand that sales leaders must possess critical management/leadership skills and traits for them to be successful in their jobs. Among those are a process orientation, strategic thinking, and a team orientation, which will enable mutually beneficial relationships with their marketing counterparts.
Dave Stein, CEO
ES Research Group, Inc.
http://www.ESResearch.com