Articles

By Adele Crane

The person you hire for the role of sales leader can define your organizations success or failure. They are the person that will set the standards of how everyone will operate within the sales organization and what performance will be delivered by everyone.

By Adele Crane

The goal of any organization is to reduce costs and maximize profitability whilst retaining customer value. That is what everyone within an organization or company thinks about, works toward and wants to achieve. In pursuit of that goal, many different principles have been applied to business but the sales and marketing function continue to fail miserably against the operational side of the business when it comes to cost reduction and maximizing profitability.

CSO Insights (USA) recently completed their 16th annual Sales Performance Optimization (SPO) study. Over 2,800 companies worldwide took part, providing data on over 100 sales metrics to help assess how well sales teams are performing, what challenges are they facing, and how are companies effectively leveraging people, process, technology and knowledge to effectively deal with those issues. As we entered 2009, we all knew we were in for a bumpy ride. So how bad was it? They asked the 2010 SPO study participants to share with them how they performed against their 2009 corporate revenue plan. Figure 1 shows the average of all their responses compared to the results of their study a year earlier.

By Adele Crane

During the GFC there has been a significant sorting of players in the market and many companies have left the playing field for good. The ones that remain have endured radical behavior from their competitors with unrealistic price cuts, offers and acts of desperation as they attempt to hold sales in a collapsing market. Some of those competitors were unable to sustain the supply chain to their customers and have opened the door again for new suppliers to approach the customers. Others have won the customer on price and the focus of their team is all about price.

By Adele Crane

Imagine this situation. You are competing against two other suppliers for the same piece of business. One company is the 900-pound guerrilla in your market and the other is a competitor of about the same size. You have the best technology, the big company has the most market share and brand recognition and the third competitor has the lowest price. Who gets the business?

The answer is extremely predictable. The company that gets the business is the one with the best salespeople and sales strategy. Good salespeople win more deals when the organization is aligned to support them winning those deals.