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Selling your services in a tough economy

The following concepts are excerpted from a webinar presentation sponsored by Minnesota Life in April 2009. View the full presentation. (You will need to use Internet Explorer to download the recording or view the LiveMeeting replay).

First, the grim news. Quota attainment among sales organizations is down to 59 percent compared to 61 percent last year.1 Depending on the industry, 25 to 33 percent of people who report sales as all or part of their job responsibilities are unsuited for their job.2  And, although eight out of 10 opportunities are lost due either to ineffective qualification or the absence of formal planning, three out of five companies do not have a sales performance measurement program in place.3 

Even if your sales organization is thriving and has the metrics in place to prove it, the market is throwing four major obstacles in the way of sales performance:

  • The economy.
  • Increasingly savvy and tough-minded buyers.
  • Increasingly relentless competition.
  • Commoditization of product offerings.

What's the answer?

To meet these challenges, sales organizations must embrace five imperatives to improve performance, says sales consultant Dave Stein. Collectively, these imperatives offer the “silver bullet” of sales effectiveness: taking a strategic approach to sales.   

  • Close the process gap. Considering the high cost of a mismatch between sales personnel and sales skills, firms should employ profile-based hiring. Specific methods and processes also are needed to nurture prospects and acquire and retain clients.
  • Implement new approaches to learning and training. Research proves that “seat of the pants” selling doesn’t cut it any longer. Yet, classroom training has become less effective. What’s needed is sales training personalized to the individual, localized to the industry and specific to the job.
  • Align sales and marketing. Marketing must lead the charge for sensing, finding, clarifying and assessing new opportunities4, while shaping anti-commoditization messaging around product differentiation and value.
  • Embrace technology-enabled selling. Sales teams that aren’t plugged into Sales 2.0 and using the social networking power of the Web for growing their businesses will be eating the dust of their competitors.
  • Measure sales performance. Sales metrics can put your organization head and shoulders above the competition, 40 percent of whom don’t have any real measurement system in place.5  Real leverage comes into play with a combination of leading (behavioral) and lagging (performance) indicators.
Dave Stein is the CEO of ES Research Group, Inc., a research and advisory firm that covers sales performance improvement programs and the companies that provide them. Prior to founding ESR, Dave spent more than 20 years in sales, sales leadership, business development, and building his own services organizations. Dave has consulted with some of the smallest and largest professional services and management consulting firms in the U.S., Europe and Asia, and is a recognized thought leader in the area of competitive selling strategies.

Dave writes the monthly Smart Sales column for Sales & Marketing Management magazine and serves as Adjunct Professor of Sales and Sales Management at The Dublin Institute of Technology, where he delivers seminars to Irish CEOs and sales executives.

Sources

1CSO Insights, 2009.

2ES Research, 2009.

3www.Fotolia.com.

4ISBM 2010 study.

5ES Research, 2009.