Do You Know If Your Sales Organization Has Performance
Gaps?
Something I've seen over and over again are businesses that have modernized areas like IT,
HR, and Financeand yet have a sales organization that is following outdated practices that
are costing them revenue. The problem is the visibility of it is lost somewhere between the
front lines and the VP and C-Levels so the real negative impact is unknown.
Even organizations that seem to maintain market share, are doing so while concurrently
preventing greater growth from the lost business that fell through the cracks unnoticed.
What are some examples?
In B2B sales, there are enterprise teams built around a model that generally includes
inbound, outbound, marketing generated opportunities or leads, and then building and
managing pipeline.
Many marketing-generated "leads" are created through a structured effort, you can see
what happened in the process as they responded to content, and engaged in some way. But,
are you able to see what happens to the leads your organization generates when they get to
the live-engagement stage? Many organizations have literally zero visibility of what happens
on the front lines in sales; yet this is where the greatest attrition in your pipeline occurs
when it isn't managed with some deliberate design.
It's relatively easy to monitor a prospect's journey with their digital interactions; you'll see
their score change/rise, you see them more frequently (or not) or responding to the things
you would expect them to. You can gauge the topics they are interested in based on their
behavior, and then feed them more of the things they are interested in. You can measure
and assign a value to most actions prospects do with your content, and you can create
messages designed for a very precise response. That is the part you do with more of a
hands-off approach.
The breakdown is when it goes to the live sales rep phase of the journey.
The challenge is that the moment it goes to a rep, 5 things happen:
Independent d