CEOs: Are your sales people systematically outselling the competition?

“It is not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

This quote rings true in our competitive market economy. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen impressive improvements in efficiency and quality when it comes to production and other business processes. But how much has your sales process evolved and improved? 

Why does leadership accept a 41.9% failure rate in sales?

In CSO Insight’s study “Sales Performance Optimization - 2015 Key Trends Analysis,” there are alarming data showing that sales effectiveness, despite picking up after the financial crisis of 2008, has actually fallen since 2012.

Gartner: "Boost your sales win rates by 50% via win-loss analysis"

Most sales organisations claim to conduct some form of win-loss analysis. But according to a recent Gartner investigation, no more than a third conduct them with the proper degree of rigour.

How to shorten the sales cycle?

I recently wrote about the five most important KPIs when tracking a sales pipeline. One question that keeps coming up in discussions with sales managers is how to shorten the sales cycle. 

Sales metrics - 5 KPIs you must track

To improve your sales team’s efforts, you need to keep an eye on your key performance indicators (KPIs). At a first glance, measuring sales appears very simple – just look at the results, right? While it’s true that the achieved business result is easy to measure, the difficulty lies in knowing how we got there and how to improve moving forward.

How much could we sell for if we organized sales efforts better? Are we leaving money on the table? Which levers can we pull?

A realistic approach to goal setting in b2b sales

Let’s start with a statistic: quota attainment in B2B sales is currently around 60%. Unfortunately, this is nothing new. On the contrary, it has been status quo for the last number of years. Yet despite the 40% failure rate, we continue with the same quota expectations and the same goal setting practices year after year after year - somehow expecting a different result. How about trying something different in 2015?