Increasing sales productivity and performance is a top challenge for any sales leader. One study even found that it surpasses the obstacles of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding.
Data suggests that salespeople spend as little as 23% of their time actually selling. In conjunction, the 2020 Media Sales Report found that nearly 1 out of every 3 (31%) of salespeople spend 20-25% of their time in discovery meetings.
Sales managers try various things to hit their targets: hiring more reps, reassigning territories, changing compensation plans… and more. Yet there’s one thing that most organizations have not tried, and when done correctly, you’ll see the growth and revenue performance you desire.
Your Sales Structure and the Sales Process
There are times when your sales process can hinder performance, but that doesn’t mean the process itself is failing. It may mean that your reps are juggling too many jobs at once or that the organization lacks the sales structure that could drive revenue performance.
Is your current structure designed to help you get consistently strong performance in the revenue areas that are most important to you? If not, here are the steps you want to take:
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Identify Problem and Define Problem
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Solve the Problem
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Roll it out
As a sales leadership team, you want to discuss your current sales structure — what’s working and what evidence do you have to back it up? What’s not working from a structure, role, and responsibilities standpoint? And what are some small or large changes that you should consider?
Once you identify the problem, you need to define it by breaking down the sales process into individual components to determine what’s holding you back. Then you solve the problem, and roll out a plan of action.
The Problem With Most Sales Structures
The sales process in its simplest form is:
- Lead Generation — finding new business; lead gen and lead nurturing
- Selling Solutions — any activity that is selling, such as discovery meetings, brings back ideas, presenting solutions and proposals, and closing business.
- Serving Clients — deliver what was sold; actually fulfill and get results -- renew and upsell and get more results.
All of these steps are extremely important and valuable, and if you want revenue performance, you must be excellent in all three.
However, the problem with most sales organizational structure is that they don’t allow salespeople do what they do best — which is sell.
By asking salespeople to do all of these things, they’re never going to be an expert in one category. Plus, they simply do not have enough time to focus on all the steps that fall under each category.
When selling solutions is the problem, there are a number of structure changes to give salespeople more selling time. Start by lifting some of the work of lead generation or serving clients – or both. You could also arm them with sales plays and sales playbooks or make changes in account assignments.
How much more revenue would your organization produce if your sellers spent more time doing what they do best — selling solutions?
Look at your sales organization and ask how you can split up the sales process so that you have the right people doing the right things. By doing this, you’ll have growth and drive revenue performance.
