So What Keeps You Awake at Night?

Sharing your nightmares can help put SFA on the right track

Lou Holtz likes to tell a story about when he took over as the head football coach at the University of Minnesota. The team was in the cellar in the Big Ten at that time, and many people questioned his decision to take the job. A few weeks after he arrived on campus a friend ran into Lou and asked him if he was worried about the challenges he faced. Lou smiled and said, "I can honestly say since I took this job I have been sleeping like a baby. Every night I wake up at two am and cry!"

Figure 1

In discussions with numerous Chief Sales Officers (CSOs) this year, that image of Lou Holtz often comes to mind. These executives are dealing with many of the same challenges Lou faced in trying to totally reinvent his program. What are the issues that are keeping today’s CSOs from sleeping well? To start to answer that question Insight Technology Group recently surveyed 50 sales executives. We asked them to assess their sales force’s ability to execute a variety of functions, using a 1 to 4 scale (1 dismal, 2 poor, 3 adequate, 4 excellent). Figure 1 overviews the ten selling tasks that kept this group of CSOs awake at night.

What about your company, what operations need to be addressed to improve your organization’s sales effectiveness? Taking the time to surface these issues can be a very valuable exercise for a sales or service reengineering team to go through. When you get down to this level of understanding what the problems are in the way you sell to and service clients, defining solutions becomes much easier. Using the four major problems identified in the chart above, consider the following examples where project focus produced breakthrough results.

A chemical firm found their biggest challenge was getting new reps up to full productivity quickly. By looking at that process in more detail, they found that when new salespeople took over a territory, they were essentially blind as to what had previously happen with their accounts. Since there were no central files regarding customer or prospect activity, these reps spent their first several months attempting to regather all this information.

The sales task force implemented an opportunity management system (OMS) and populated it with information on all know past dealings with their clients. By having access to this information in the OMS on day one, the time to get a new sales person effectively selling has been cut in half. Calculate the ROI you could generate if you were able to do this with your sales organization and the numbers will stun you.

A window manufacturer who relied totally on channel partners to sell their windows was running into significant pushback from their agents. The company could manufacture over 100,000 unique windows, which was a competitive edge. But it took a working knowledge of trigonometry to for an agent to correctly put together an order.

To more effectively support their channel partners, the manufacturer built a PC-based product configurator that guided the agent through working with their clients to correctly generate the right window options to meet their unique needs. By providing this tool to the channel they saw an order of magnitude decrease in order errors and a significant increase in channel satisfaction ratings.

The introduction of 15,000 to 20,000 new products into the marketplace each year represented a significant opportunity for a nation-wide retail chain in the form of a variety of incentives manufacturers offered for stocking these new items. But, as with any retail operation, the firm had a finite amount of shelf space.

The retailer implemented a data mining system to analyze which brands customers were actually buying. Through this analysis they found that in many cases 10% of the products generated up to 90% of sales in a given category. With the ability to conduct detailed market basket analysis, the firm started dramatically streamlining their operations. For example, in the wine category, even though they reduced the number of brands carried from 600 to less than 150, wine sales increased significantly. This retailer can now determine which new products will best meet the needs of their shoppers, and they have freed up the shelve space to carry those goods.

Finally, a medical firm saw their sales increase dramatically when they made it easy for their salespeople to get access to information on the variety of products they carried. Many of their reps complained that doctors often asked them for details on drugs, laboratory equipment, tests, etc. If they were lucky enough to have that information in their sample cases they often got a new sale. But carrying data sheets on all the thousands of products they carried was impossible.

Their SFA team built a marketing encyclopedia that provided the salesperson with all the catalogue data on their personal computer, along with a easy to use search engine. When this was released to the field, sales when up 30%. The sales force attributed this to their ability to quickly answer a prospect’s questions and close the order, versus having to say "Let me get back to you on that."

In each of the above cases significant progress was made in improving sales effectiveness because a specific problem was being focused on. Do you know what aspect of the way you sell represents the biggest potential for improvement? If you take the time to surface the nightmares in your sales operations, and focus your reengineering resources on dealing with them, you will find that you sleep a lot better very soon.

Jim Dickie is Managing Partner for Insight Technology Group, a consulting firm that specializes in researching how companies are reengineering they way they sell to and service customers. He can be reached via email at jimdickie@aol.com.