Is “quote, chase and pray” your sales playbook?

I just met with sales leadership at two respectable companies with yearly revenues in the billions and was completely blown away with the lack of structure, follow-up and ambition when it comes to b2b sales effectiveness.

Questions like ”what’s your current win-rate?”, ”how do you sell differently from your competition?” and ”how do you coach your sales people?” gave me a blank stare, a slight change of skin color and the reply ”I should be able to give you straight answers, but can’t”. 

The sales playbook in these companies was to receive RFPs (or ask existing customers if “anything is going on”), send a quote, chase the buyer by phone and email and adjust quotes until they say yes or no. Money keeps flowing in, as the products are competitive, the brand name well known and … the price is right?

Their sales people have nice salaries, company cars and solid benefits. Why change behaviors? There’s no urgency - until there is. When your competitors change the game by adding more value than you do, the pain will become apparent. All of a sudden, just having the products and the “right price” is not enough.

Stop and think

If your sales playbook is “quote, chase and pray” – stop and think! For how long will this be profitable? What could a smart competitor do to throw you off? Look at how competition is changing in other industries and design a new sales playbook to improve your sales effectiveness and preserve margins. And yes, changing behaviors is difficult. But slowly killing your profitability is much worse.

Successful sales teams don't just sell more efficiently - they sell differently. Download this whitepaper to learn more.