Increase your ROI by implementing Salesforce Productivity techniques that eliminate hidden factories
Implementing the right measures and processes can take your sales and ROI to the next level. It doesn't have to be an all-or-none implementation either. If you think about the various metrics embedded in salesforce productivity, such as efficiency, effectiveness, sales leverage, sales utilization and various other discretely measurable processes - a salesforce productivity maturity journey can be clearly mapped out and implemented in an incremental approach. This can minimize the change management effort required while simultaneously driving progress toward world-class salesforce productivity best practices.
Here are some areas salesforce productivity specifically addresses:
Define what your sales team should do and NOT do. Sales capacity is a finite resource and your primary growth engine for generating value for your business. Enabling sales excellence requires a disciplined approach to defining activity ownership across functions and measuring the performance of those activities. This is an essential step for identifying and eliminating "hidden-factory" activities. Salesforce capacity, if not fiercely protected, often gets consumed by non-value add activities that and may not even be sales related. For example, following up on POs, chasing down service related issues, or even helping the customer get a product warranty adjudication resolved. While these may be important activities, frankly - they are NOT sales activities and do not directly drive sales. These activities need to be identified and performed by the appropriate function. For example, Finance, Customer Support or Customer Service should be performing these activities - not Sales. When migrating these activities into another function, careful attention needs to be paid in also moving capacity with it. It's a balance.
Salesforce productivity is a term that has different meanings to different people. Service sales, B2B, B2C, SaaS, etc., all have varying approaches in Go-To-Market strategies. However, salesforce productivity is a consistent measure across virtually any sales entity.
In one of our Design of Experiments (DoE) at Outperforma, we were able to determine exactly what activities resulted in the highest sales conversion rates. We were also able to identify non-value added activities that were important and necessary to the business, but they hindered results for sales personnel. With our process we were able to migrate those tasks to other functions along with the appropriate amount of capacity to the proper functions.
This allowed sales personnel to focus on high value selling activities and helped optimize the processes that drove predictably higher sales. This also helped eliminate "hidden factories" buried in the sales function.
Let us know if you think your company could benefit from implementing world class salesforce productivity techniques. This could be a great opportunity for you to obtain distinct competitive advantage.