Breakfast content
A Salesperson’s Typical Day
Current reality
If we consider a typical salesperson’s day, about 80% of their time is spent on account management (attending to inbound inquiries, processing orders, quoting, resolving issues and the like). This leaves only 20% of their time to spend on the pursuit of new business. That 20% is split between finding folks to talk to and then actually doing the talking!
So, the solution, in theory, is simple!
Future reality
All you have to do is create an environment for salespeople that enables them to dedicate 100% of their time to the pursuit of new business. Or more specifically, an environment that empowers salespeople to dedicate 100% of their time to selling conversations, performed in pursuit of new business (new customers and new categories for existing customers).
But this is easier said than done as it requires a complete rethink in the design and function of operations, marketing and of course, sales.
This breakfast will show you how to do it
Step 1
Make Operations responsible for revenue NOT Sales
First, if you want your organization to grow, you need to make Operations NOT Sales responsible for revenue to allow your sales department to exclusively focus on new business.
More often than not, this requires some enhancement of Operations. That might mean a larger and more capable Customer Service team. It probably means better integration between Customer Service and other departments like Engineering, Quoting, Procurement, Production and Finance.
The bottom line is that you need Operations to perform all Account Management tasks at a faster rate and to a higher standard, relative to salespeople’s normal performance to give everyone in the organization the confidence to free up salespeople to pursue new business 100% of the time.
Step 2
Move Prospecting to Marketing
You then need to take what salespeople call prospecting and move it to the Marketing department. But in order to move prospecting to Marketing, you need to do two things.
- You need to redefine the concept of a sales lead.
- But to do this, you need to change the relationship between the Marketing and Sales departments.
Step 3
Focus your salespeople on selling conversions
Freeing salespeople capacity is good but isn’t what really drives the needle. What really drives double-digit growth is the number of selling conversations your salespeople perform each day.
It’s quite feasible for an organization to generate a 20X increase in the amount selling conversations salespeople perform each week if they are freed from all non-selling activities.
*In most technical organizations, legacy sales team members tend to move into account management and semi-technical roles and the internal sales roles are populated with new team members.
Get your sales team selling 100% of their time
What does the end result look like?
A larger, more capable customer service team
Consisting of one central team of tier-one generalists, supported by a small group of tier-two specialists. This team is designed to perform tasks at a faster rate and to a higher standard, relative to salespeople’s traditional performance.
The Marketing department is responsible for prospecting
This means that the marketing department has the ability to generate sales opportunities at a faster rate than salespeople can consume them and that the salespeople start work each day with exactly the same number of open opportunities.
A robust inside sales team
Performing a magnitude of more selling conversations than their direct competitors in the pursuit of new business.
A specialist team of technical (or semi-technical) experts
Who perform all the necessary field-based activities that require face-to-face interaction.
