Prepare Your Sales Teams for a Successful 2022 - Insights and Ideas to Achieve Success
By Michael J Griffin of ELAvate
6 minute read
January 2022 will soon be upon us and many sales teams will start the year with increased sales targets founded on the vision of a positive post Covid world. I recently received two research papers from Korn Ferry and Allego on the state of sales enablement and sales team productivity. In this blog I will focus on six research insights that may affect your sales team success and actions that can increase your sales team competitiveness.
Sales Management
Korn Ferry sales research says that consistent sales management/coaching produces high levels of sales team performance across these three areas:
Managers who coach salespeople have higher levels of performance.
Sales Managers who consistently coach have a 12% higher quota attainment and 22.4% lower voluntary attrition. Action Points: Assess your sales managers’ willingness and skill to coach and drive sales revenue. Create coaching skill training and development plans tailored to each sales manager. Measure weekly sales coaching activity: Joint sales calls, key account planning meetings, daily kick off meetings and monthly sales training sessions to his/her sales reps.
Use sales analytics to measure and predict salesperson/team performance.
Those who say they use sales analytics to measure and predict sales performance report 10.7% higher quota attainment and 11% higher win rates as well as 4.5% higher revenue attainment. Action Points: Set up monthly sales team scorecards that use primarily leading not lagging indicators of sales actions and process. Explore how your CRM system is supporting and integrated to capture and collect leading sales performance indicators so your organization build an AI capability of predicting account sales growth.
Align sales management, enablement, operations, marketing &IT to drive results.
Sales organizations who agree that sales management, operations, and enablement are effectively aligned to drive results achieve 12.2% higher win rates and 14.8% higher quota attainment. Action Points: Arrange for a collaborative meeting with Marketing, IT, and Finance to discuss how each function’s processes can be better aligned for driving salespeople productivity. Set up monthly collaborative goals between marketing and sales management to synergize joint goals and activities to drive sales productivity.
Salespeople Productivity
Research by McKinsey and Allego demonstrate focusing and strengthening salesperson skill and professionalism pays handsome dividends.
Customers are reducing the time spent meeting B2B salespeople. Allego says McKinsey has uncovered that customers spend less than 20% of their buying time meeting salespeople. The tech savvy younger buyers are using technology to make better buying decisions and not relying as much on salespeople. Poorly prepared salespeople are quickly shown the door or the “leave button” killing the sale and crippling increased sales revenue. Action Points: Implement “Pre Call Planners” salespeople can use to better prepare for sales meetings. These may be integrated with your Key Account Planners. Have a KPI for the sales manager to participate and review rep pre call planning coupled with a KPI for joint sales calls with each rep.
Sales organizations struggle to implement successful product training.
These initiatives suffer or are ignored due to competing priorities and lack of alignment between sales and marketing teams. The result of poor product solution training: On average, sales reps don’t know the answer to 40% of product questions asked by customers. Reps at organizations that use sales enablement platforms are 73% more effective at understanding and presenting new products and features.
Action Points: Put your marketing people through sales training so they better understand how salespeople need to relate with customers. Send marketing people on joint sales visits with your salespeople. Ensure marketing is developing sales collateral that reps can use to educate and support customer decisions to use your product or service.
Most sales organizations do not have a continuous process for sales training.
Treating sales training as a one off event is a mistake many organizations make. The result: 47% of companies surveyed say inadequate seller training is a key factor in missing revenue goals. Action Points: Assess your salespeople for their selling skills, attitude, and product knowledge. Design a sales training process that is not event based but linked to sales coaching KPI’s and individual salesperson development. Train your sales managers to be effective sales trainers in reinforcing selling skills, key account planning, product knowledge, and communication.
Tackle these six areas of sales team productivity by implementing the “Action Points” for each area and exceed your sales organization sales targets in 2022. At ELAvate have worked with well over 800 sales organizations to solve these productivity gaps using the “Action Points.” Send me an email is you wish to explore cost effective culturally adapted solutions to support your organization’s sales goals in 2022 michael.griffin@elavateglobal.com
Begin your planning for an even better 2022!
Michael J Griffin
Founder of ELAvate
Sales Productivity Consultant