Working Smarter? How?
Turns out that the answer lies in these two keywords — "working" and "smarter". The working part targets selling time and resources. The smarter part deals with better ways to allocate these. You don't have to hire better salespeople or spend a lot more money training and incenting them. You can work smarter with any existing salesforce.
If you have been in sales, or have travelled with salespeople as they work, you may have observed that:
- They often devote a substantial portion of their time to unproductive (non-selling) activities.
- They tend to over-allocate their time and resources to accounts that have little or no growth potential.
- They typically do not have any coordinated strategy for acquiring, growing, and retaining accounts.
Most importantly, there are often huge differences between salespeople in these activities. A few will be sharply focused on selling and will allocate their time strategically. Among them are your best practices models. The majority, however, will be less productive than these top performers because, to varying degrees, they do not allocate selling time and resources as effectively.
Time and Resources
These are the raw materials of sales work. You have a certain number of hours a day, supplemented by resources such as telemarketing, literature, promotions, games, and events. You can use these in many different ways.
Some ways work better than others. A best practices approach would seek to identify the ways that work best and to move the sales force as a whole toward these ways.
Allocating Time and Resources
Much of selling is done intuitively, opportunistically, and reactively. Some effort nearly always goes into planning but plans are often ignored in practice. This almost guarantees that the selling process will be less effective and less efficient than it could be.
Better allocation of selling time and resources ideally requires some kind of planning, tracking, and optimizing tool. but none of the available tools handles these adequately. Virtually all are essentially administrative in nature.
Smarter Allocation
This is the essence of our approach. The resources you have to work with are usually pretty clear and not hard to list. What is hard is:
- Figuring out how you allocate resources today.
- Figuring out a more productive, smarter allocation.
Time is normally the scarcest and most costly selling resource. It makes sense to focus on time allocation even though there are many other selling resources that we commonly use. ...More...
Working Harder
Selling is very hard work, even for the most proficient. Nobody intentionally wastes time or slacks off. To make quotas, they just work harder.
They increase the number of sales calls. They work longer hours and into weekends. They prepare elaborate presentations. They travel more. They prepare papers and accept speaking offers. They entertain.
Harder works.
But what if they could find a better approach that might be able to, say, reduce the number of calls and shift the freed-up time into different, more productive activities or accounts?
This requires the ability to determine where they are working most productively and where they are just working harder. You need a way to assess productivity and to reallocate time toward accounts that offer the greatest potential return.
Fortunately, the mechanics of this approach are not rocket science but they do require a quite different method of allocating selling time.