Five Sales Performance Blind Spots Sales Leaders Apparently Don’t Even Know They Have

A 2015 CSO Insights study on Sales Enablement Optimization discovered that a broad spectrum of companies are investing in five key areas of sales enablement this year: Collaboration, tech-enabled training, content management, virtual coaching, and analytics.

While all five of those factors are critical to sales performance, I’m struck less by what is on the list and more by what is not: Sales performance visibility. The current lack of visibility on most sales teams causes a host of sales performance ills: Missed targets, lack of accountability, off-target forecasts, and busywork for salespeople and managers alike. Yet, according to the study, investment in solving these problems is not a top priority for a lot of organizations.

Based on my conversations with sales leaders, I suspect the reason for this disconnect is that many organizations don’t know the technology exists to eliminate their blind spots. In the absence of this awareness, some sales leaders may not even realize the blind spots exist.

Here are five visibility weaknesses most sales organizations suffer from, that can be solved with the right technology.

1. Salespeople look busy, but aren't making progress towards gaining customers' trust and business
   With traditional sales technology, salespeople are encouraged to track their activities, and are measured in part on the number of activities they engage in and how deep their pipeline appears to be. This creates an environment in which salespeople may engage in less valuable activities in order to look busy, or log unqualified prospects in order to inflate their pipeline. The result is that sales managers can’t tell at a glance whether a particular salesperson is making progress toward sales—or is just doing time.
2. Sales leaders can see when the organization doesn’t reach its targets, but can’t pinpoint where the problems occurred
   Most sales technology ecosystems provide no early warning signals that targets may not be met, nor diagnostic capabilities for understanding why they weren’t met. We know from research that a healthy process, along with salespeople who follow the process, is critical to a sales organization’s success. Without a way to see when and where in the sales process salespeople fail to execute well, it’s impossible to know why the organization isn’t performing as it should.
3. Managers and salespeople waste time on busywork
   In a traditional sales organization, managers often have to track salespeople down to find out whether they’re doing the things they’re supposed to do. This creates unnecessary busywork for managers, who either don’t provide coaching at all, or spend a disproportionate amount of time gathering the information necessary to provide good coaching and management. On the flip side, salespeople waste time filling out CRM data that tells managers that they’re working on something—but not whether it’s the right things.
4. Sales leaders have no single “overview” into what salespeople do on a daily basis
   Understanding what salespeople are actually doing on a daily basis is impossible in most sales organizations. CRM may tell managers what an individual salesperson is doing, but it won’t give managers high-level insight into performance to process across the organization, nor will it send notifications when activities aren’t progressing according to the process.
5. Forecasts are often wildly off target
   Wildly off-target forecasts are caused by a variety of factors, many of which point back at failed visibility. When salespeople are incentivized to make their pipelines look good, they’ll often sandbag their prospect list. Because definitions for “qualified prospect” and “sales cycle start” are often up to the individual interpretation of the salesperson, the data on which forecasts are based become skewed, and when the data is unreliable, the results will be as well.

The technology to address all of these sales visibility challenges does exist.

Membrain bakes process and methodology into CRM, so leaders can quickly see where salespeople are in their sales process with each lead, access a quick overview of the entire team’s performance against process, and easily see where breakdowns in the process occur, as they occur.

As each key step and milestone of the process is checked off by a salesperson, the system highlights them as red or green according to standardized metrics. The prospect is only recommended to be moved into the next stage of the process when key qualifiers and milestones are marked as green. This standardizes the data to ensure reliable outputs, and enables sales leaders to easily see whose pipeline is healthy, where coaching help is needed, and which opportunities should be dropped in order to free time for more promising leads.

Because every element of the process is clearly defined and tracked inside the system, from what constitutes a qualified prospect to what marks the end of a sales cycle, forecasting becomes fast, easy, and accurate.

There is certainly nothing wrong with companies investing in the big five technologies identified in the CSO Insights report. In fact, all five of them are also supported by Membrain. Collaboration is easier because salespeople can see each other’s progress and coach each other against the system. Training is enabled because videos and other content can be embedded into the system at the point in the process where the salesperson needs it. Content can likewise be embedded at the relevant process point to make content management easier. Virtual coaching occurs when coaches see a weakness in a salesperson’s process and quickly steps in to have a conversation and support the salesperson to complete the steps or reach the next milestone. Plus, Membrain helps companies bake KPIs into the system, making analytics and reporting a snap.

Organizations that add improved sales visibility into their technology toolkit this year will almost certainly excel against their peers, but you don’t have to take my word for it. See how Membrain’s improved visibility yielded a 50% profit increase for Scania Mining, then schedule a demo.