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Increased Sales Effectiveness: Opportunity #1

Written by: Peter Michie

Article Overview: This article uses a Survey of about 3,000 sales people to draw a concusion about a large opportunity for increased sales effectiveness that exists in most sales forces.

Increased Sales Effectiveness: Opportunity #1

Introduction
Before proposing anything to our customers, PERFORMAX often conducts a Needs Analysis Survey of their sales force.

So, as a bye product of surveying about 3,000 sales people on about 60 questions, some interesting conclusions, or opportunities for improvement emerged:

Sales Feedbacks on Themselves
18% of respondents did not have documented sales goals, and of the 82 percent of respondents who did:

• 23% felt their targets were unfair;

• 50% were forecasting that they would not reach their annual sales goals;

• 85% had no documented plan for reaching their goals;

• 73% had no account strategy for their top five accounts.


Sales Feedbacks on Their Sales Managers
Most respondents gave their managers high ratings in the areas of selling and personal skills.

But they gave sales managers poor marks for their management skills - more than 33% rated their managers at less than 50% in their management capabilities.

Conclusion
Thus, there is a huge opportunity for improved Sales Effectiveness in most sales forces by selecting the right people to be sales managers, and ensuring that they are well trained and competent as managers.

The sales managers who we have trained had an average of 6.5 sales people reporting to them, so if you can increase the effectiveness of the manager by 10%, the leverage is huge!


Peter Michie, Founder of PERFORMAX 561.202.8163

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Article Tags: account strategy, analysis survey, conclusion, conclusions, improved sales, leverage, management capabilities, management skills, michie, personal skills, poor marks, respondents, sales effectiveness, sales goals, sales managers, targets



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