Each year companies spend a king’s ransom in getting their sales teams to sell smarter. They invest in serious sales skill development – they implement the latest in sales training and sales coaching technologies.This time, money and effort are well warranted.
Simultaneously, most customer organizations are going through transformational changes in what they buy, how they buy, and what they are willing to pay for it. When buyers make these kinds of changes, selling organizations need to adjust and adapt to how they sell.
Unfortunately, selling smarter is only half the answer. Sellers also need to sell harder. Here, the bad news is that across research studies, the estimate is: salespeople only spend one-third of their time directly selling to customers and two-thirds doing something else.
Now, what might happen if one was to reverse those percentages – spend two-thirds of the time directly selling to customers and one-third doing something else? The worse possible outcome – you would end up with a much happier sales team.
Given these potential outcomes, here are some starter ideas if one wanted to accept the challenge:
Leverage salesforce technology tools. Today these tools can help a sales team sell more effectively and more efficiently. However, the caution is one must increase the sales operations infrastructure, or the result could be an increase in the administrative burden on the sales team versus an increase in their productivity.
Help front-line sales managers filter versus funnel. The position of front-line sales management is the pivotal job for any successful sales team change effort. To increase selling time, the challenge is to filter the information requests from corporate versus directly funneling all those requests on to their sales team.
Realign the relationship between Marketing and Sales. For too long in too many companies, Marketing and Sales have been like two trains passing in the night. Regarding the time customer question, it’s not only the amount of time salespeople spend with prospects but also which prospects. With today’s tools, Marketing can provide Sales with the prospects that have a higher propensity to buy.
Revisit the organizational structure of the sales team. In general, the most effective and efficient organizational structure varies with the life cycle of the organization. The structure that is most productive for a start-up is different than for a company at mid-life versus one at a state of maturity. Too often, there is a legacy design that is more about the past than about the future. For example, it could be time to revisit the merits of that hunter-farmer model, or maybe the notion of an inside sales group is not such a bad idea for providing your outside team with more time to spend with customers.
In today’s highly competitive environment, companies that spend time thinking about how to reduce the amount of time salespeople spend on administrative activities and increasing the time with customers have more often than not been highly rewarded for their efforts.