Senior Executives:
Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams Missing their Numbers?
(Yet Working Harder Than Ever?)
Download this Four Step Approach
to Improving B2B Sales Performance
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Hello, I’m Michael Webb, author of "Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way" (Kaplan, 2006). B2b companies who are missing their sales numbers, are often a huge challenge. I’m not just referring to problems created by the financial crisis and the recession, although they make things worse. Doesn’t it seem to you that prospects and customers might have been less responsive to marketing and promotions even before the economy declined? |
Most companies’ marketing departments struggle with disappointing promotional campaigns, websites that frustrate salespeople and even customers and are understaffed, under funded, and underappreciated.
A famous blogger, named David Armano, created this great illustration of marketing departments struggling with fads and trends like viral marketing, social marketing, and micro-sites:
Meanwhile, as customers have universally switched to looking for information on the Internet to help them solve problems, salespeople and distributors are often starving for qualified opportunities, and struggling with prospects and customers who seem less ready to buy, and more sensitive to price.
Hasn’t the sales department tried a similar roulette wheel?
- training campaigns that didn’t produce
- sales processes no one follows
- CRM software no one likes to use
- contests, reorganizations, and other initiatives that didn’t produce improvement?
To make matters worse, doesn’t it seem that everyone is seeing something different?
Who Works on Making Sales Easier?
Sales executives who may have average tenures of less than two years, can feel enormous pressure, may react defensively to any attempt to “improve their process.” They believe resource should be spent differently from the way most marketers feel they should be spent.
Sales operations managers, sales trainers, CRM software managers, or other personnel often see the systemic issues, but can’t do much about them.
Salespeople, for their part just keep trying to get around the obstacles to achieve their objectives.
With everyone looking for solutions in a different direction, how can anyone know what will improve productivity?
When people are working so hard, and forecasts are unreliable, and results don’t come, can you really hold people accountable?
That’s when executives cling tightly to old fashioned myths … like
“Sales is about hiring the best people and pressuring them to perform,” or
“If only employees would do their jobs correctly, we would have few if any problems”
In environments like this, decisions can only be made by politics, or by personality, or by position, rather than by evidence.
Companies put their best people on these problems.
Yet, they may have only a vague idea of how their sales – or their marketing – departments really work.
They fiercely spin the roulette wheel, changing people, or adding channels, campaigns, products, or systems … shown as the jagged line trending upward in the picture … only to experience diminishing returns.
The diagram below depicts results before and after inputs are increased.
If the yield increases (and that’s a big if), things becomes less predictable. That’s because no one knows which work adds value, and which is waste.
Think about that …
- How well does your company distinguish the sales and marketing initiatives to invest in, from the ones to pass up?
- How well do your salespeople prioritize the customers they should pursue, from the ones to walk away from?
It doesn’t have to be that way!
Just imagine what it might be like if your sales and marketing were a system designed to produce the messages that cause the right kind of prospects to inquire, with nurturing campaigns that educate and motivate them, until they were qualified to talk to salespeople.
And, when salespeople are presented with those qualified opportunities they have a way of knowing which will end up buying, and how they needed to be sold?
Think you’re dreaming? … You should be dreaming!
Because those kinds of results are happening in companies that have learned to take a more scientific, evidence-driven approach to their sales and marketing:
Increased Close Ratio and Forecast Accuracy
For example, the president of a software company was frustrated because his salespeople were not doing what a well-known sales training company had been paid to teach them.
After they set up a proper framework, the salespeople were not only following the new process, but their close ratio increased more than 25%, on the same quantity and quality of sales leads. The same happened in their account management department. And, their sales forecast accuracy exceeded 90%.
Achieved 5 Year Plan in 4 Years
In another example, a division of DuPont applied the principles, and went from second place in the market and declining to dominating the market with a billion dollars in revenue. Their general manager made the cover of Fortune Magazine because they achieved their five year plan in four years.
More Success Examples
Download the B2B Sales Performance Improvement Kit Now
It is time to take a fresh approach. The evidence is available to make your sales and marketing work faster and more efficiently.
Fill out the form below and you’ll discover a disciplined, reliable approach for producing revenue. Most importantly, you’ll see how your salespeople will respect and appreciate it.
The Sales Performance Improvement Kit includes
- Screen Capture Videos: The Four Steps to Improving B2B Sales Performance
- Access to the Free Sales Process Basics Area, including these whitepapers:
- Short email course illustrating the B2B Sales Performance Improvement Kit
- Customer Value Mapping: How to Make Marketing and Selling Easier
- What Impact Does Your Sales Process Have on Your Financial Statements?
- Subscription to Free SPIF! the only weekly newsletter devoted to sales process improvement.
