Making The Grade
Over the last few weeks there has been an amazing amount of stuff written about a recently released study about sales teams making their numbers. According to the statistics a huge percentage of folks did not make it to the annual award meeting The fact that the majority of reps did not make their numbers is not what I find surprising. After all, we do set the targets as a stretch
What I do find more revealing is that there are some pretty significant differences in perception about what is working and what is not working in the field. For example, there was a pretty big disparity regarding the perception of the efficacy of sales processes between reps and managers.
So, the majority of our sales professionals do not achieve their sales targets and they feel that there are problems with the sales process. Meanwhile the majority of managers are unhappy with the achievement of sales targets, but they think that sales processes are fine. Which is the correlation that we should be attending to?
Generally speaking, I feel that many of my sales management clients are not aware of some of the sales process issues that get in the way of prductive selling. I'll often enquire about the existance of sales stages or a pipeline methodology and will often be told that a standard process exists and is embedded within the SFA tool. However, when I as this question out in the field I will be told that there are some partially defined steps that don't necessarily fit all groups and are not always followed and why am I asking?
My guess is more sales folks would make their numbers if more effort were placed on getting the sales processes addressed. This implies both the processes that are specific to the individual sales rep and those processes the integrate that rep to marketing, telesales, order management, and services.
When the pocesses are messy, it is harder to be successful.