Organizations are now spending more on sales than any other industry, yet revenue per sales person is falling and sales force effectiveness is reducing.
While sales representatives are being added, the increase in revenue is not aligned to this cost. Organizations are looking at initiatives to increase revenues without increasing sales headcount, reduce operational costs, and utilize their existing sales force more efficiently and effectively.
From our experience, a major cause of the problems facing the sales function is the lack of accurate and timely information to monitor in real time, manage, and predict sales performance. As a result, sales executives are not able to get the actionable insights they need to make informed decisions.
Organization’s now face a challenge where their old products are getting obsolete, and new products are not replacing lost revenues quickly enough. Meanwhile, the organizations are also faced with managing complex, people-intensive processes often with inadequate tools. Apart from that, Customers have evolved, pipelines have shrunk, thousands of stakeholders need attention and budgets are restricted. Finally, non-traditional decision makers, such as payers in emerging markets, consumers and associations will have more control which will force companies to be smarter and more targeted with the remaining field forces while coping with various regulatory compliance.
There is a dire need within companies to do more with less. Success will be based on the value that sales reps bring to them, more than just the value inherent in the products they sell.
A recent research study from Pace indicates that the average sales rep spends only 23% of their time selling; the rest of their time is allocated to gathering information and data analysis. Yet so many of the initiatives we see seem to be focused in on the 23%, not the 77%. They do not deliver the benefits because they are not focused around the bigger performance issues that the organization’s sales force needs to contend with.
Where we add value is by leveraging our extensive Business Analytics expertise, our thorough understanding of the function of sales in the organization, and our deep knowledge of the individual industry. Our knowledge and expertise will lead to solving the Sales force effectiveness pains and increase overall sales by:
- Helping you establish a roadmap and a clear strategic set of objectives and priorities that allows your sales force to be aligned around your organization’s strategy.
- Helping you deploy solid cross functional performance metrics, not efficiency, not effectiveness, but performance metrics that can truly benchmark the performance of your field force.
- Providing you with an effective management solution, including on-the-fly analysis across multiple data Sources and mobile capabilities for your sales reps. This will ultimately translate into sales reps focusing more on selling and adding value rather than gathering information.