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Sales Productivity is All About Outcomes (so why focus on inputs?)

Written by: John Cousineau

Article Overview: Selling business-to-business is all about outcomes (sell enough, and your commission will increase). Yet many companies looking to improve their results focus, today, on improving their inputs. B2B sales productivity requires a focus from beginning to end on outcomes. Sales efforts aren't productive if they don't yield sales and get prospects to progress towards sales. Proof of sales is dead easy. Proof of the latter is much harder. It's commonly based on what Rep have done and their impressions of their prospects' interests. Give Reps better, more precise, data on their prospects' interests, and help Reps (using this data) invest their efforts wisely, and their productivity will improve. Sales cycles will shrink. We've proven it.

Sales Productivity is All About Outcomes (so why focus on inputs?)

Selling business-to-business is all about outcomes (sell enough, and your commission will increase). Yet many companies looking to improve their results focus, today, on improving their inputs.

Not making your quota? Work harder. Make more calls. Be more disciplined in scheduling callbacks. Take more complete notes of what you've just learned. Produce new collateral.

Sales productivity requires a focus from beginning to end on outcomes. Sales efforts aren't productive if they don't yield sales and progressions towards sales.

In our model of sales productivity, sales occur as a result of a series of pre-sales outcomes from sequential, productive, conversations between a Rep and a prospect. Prospects become engaged. They take time out of their busy schedules to read emailed materials and, in doing so, advance themselves through the process. Have more good conversations with prospects, and more will go on to read requirements specs, proposals, and eventually contracts.

We capture and use data on what types of documents prospects are reading to report how many are progressing, how quickly, through each of several pre-sales milestones. Armed with new information on who to call, now, and why, Sales Reps are able to have more conversations each week with prospects. Armed with new information on what each prospect is interested in, and the relative urgency of their interests, Sales Reps are able to have better, more engaging, conversations that shrink the time and effort required to close new sales. Sales cycles shrink. Conversion rates improve. Reps' earnings grow.

In this context, productive reps are ones who generate extraordinary results in extraordinarily little time with extraordinarily little effort. Such reps actually exist.

They 're not just the ones with the fattest wallets. They're the ones having the most fun.


Consider this example: the norm for one of our clients, prior to using our sales productivity software (Amacus), was a 9 month sales cycle. In five and a half months using Amacus, one of their reps closed 18 new sales. It took him only 218 conversations with his new prospects to identify and close those new deals; an average of fewer than 8 conversations per week. Deal size varied from lo five figures to lo six figures. He had a ton of fun.

To me, that's the look and feel of actual B2B sales productivity. A process that isn't just focussed on outcomes, it's equipped to deliver more of them.

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Article Tags: amacus, collateral, conversations, conversion rates, earnings, little time, milestones, norm, pre sales, productivity software, progressions, proposals, prospects, quota, relative urgency, sales cycles, sales efforts, sales productivity, sales reps, wallets



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