“I’m sorry but we’ve decided to go with Company X, instead of you. Thanks for all your hard work”. As a sales professional, hearing this statement from a prospective client can be a bitter pill to swallow, particularly after a long and complex sales cycle.
Early in my career as an entrepreneur, I struggled to improve performance on my sales teams. Like many people responsible for sales teams, I hired and fired repeatedly, looking for the rock star performers who could make the organization succeed.
The concept of ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of your sales force is becoming popular in the world of sales training. Winning the hearts and minds of sellers happens when you give salespeople decision-making tools that remove ambiguity, create clarity of task for each seller, and equip them with tools, resources, and coaching that is highly targeted and relevant.
It’s no secret that user adoption is one of the biggest obstacles to a successful CRM implementation. According to a survey made by Merkle, approximately 63% of large CRM implementations fail, and 49% of those failures are due to slow user adoption.
Traditionally, after gross revenue, tracking win rates is one of the most widely measured metrics in sales. Many studies and research projects focus on tracking win rates as a key performance indicator, and the prevailing vision is "the higher, the better." And any of my clients routinely track win rates, too.
When I ask sales leaders about win/loss analysis, nearly everyone agrees that it is important. But when I ask them whether their company engages in them consistently and effectively, very few answer with a confident “yes.”
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