Blog Universal

In 2009 sales managers across the world awoke to a new era of management. The markets had changed and a new game had begun with the onset of the global financial crisis (GFC). Chief sales officers are now confronted with designing strategies that will resurrect the organization’s sales performance and drive the growth into the future. They look to their sales managers to translate those strategies at the customer interface and achieve the sales goals set.

The shift of focus from product selling to solution selling has brought huge benefits and huge challenges to selling organisations over the past 10 years. The benefits include higher-value sales, higher customer satisfaction, and long term supplier-customer relationships. However, the challenges this shift has brought include: greater skills are required for selling and higher wage bills for those higher skills; and longer sales cycles and poorer closure rates, i.e. deals slip, get cancelled or are lost despite being part of the sales forecast. The last point is the greatest reason why sales managers and sales directors resist the shift. Yet we have developed clear evidence that the sales-cycle in solution sales do not actually have to be longer. A great consultative sales methodology can really make the selling of high-value solutions a rapid process and it will transform the effectiveness of any company’s solution sales force in terms of closing deals on time.

Everyday, I speak with sales executives about the issues of sales productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency. For any sales executive it’s a critical issue, something they are constantly seeking to improve. All the executives I speak with are bright, successful people. They constantly are looking at their sales processes, the skills of their people, the tools their people use, and other things to get the highest levels of performance out of their sales people. They are fine tuning, trying to find an edge, a few percent productivity improvement here or there. They are looking to reduce sales cycle times, improve win rates. They are looking at more effective and efficient ways of filling the top of their funnels.