15 Nov Unburden Busy Sales People
Sales Beacon, with our newly acquired WBE Canada certification, was proud to be one of the two Gold Sponsors at the INNOVATE + IGNITE conference to show support for WBE Canada. Lesek Demont, Director of Sales at Sales Beacon, was a keynote speaker at the one-day conference organized in Toronto in September.
One of the key challenges of sales productivity she highlighted during around-table discussion was account managers (AMs) dealing with complex enterprise sales. Busy sales people are buried under piles of administrative tasks and spend most of their time chasing people, leaving them with less time to do what they do best, SELLING!
Salespeople spend only 39% of their time on ‘role-specific’ activities or, in other words, on selling.
The Challenge
According to a 2014 report by McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), busy sales people spend only 39% of their time on ‘role-specific’ activities or, in other words, on selling. More recently, Docurated’s State of Sales Productivity 2015 study found that sales reps spend only one third of their time selling. 31% of their time is spent searching for or creating content. 20% of their time is spent on CRM/admin/reporting.
Less selling time also implies that AMs and other sales people managing big corporate accounts struggle to give their clients the attention they deserve. Today’s buyers are more informed than ever with the power of internet at hand. They have become more demanding and often require customized solutions and support. Busy sales people have to be prepared to attract, retain and support customers at every stage of the engagement.
The Solution
Sales Beacon absolutely understands this sales productivity challenge and specializes in accelerating sales workflow by unburdening busy sales people off their administrative tasks. With support from our Sales Pass consultants, our clients have regained control of their complex enterprise sales pursuits. Lesek’s comments at the WBE Conference show what Sales Beacon passionately believes less stressed teams better understand customer goals and move the needle faster.
Lesek highlighted one of our many successful engagements with a client in a leading telecommunications firm. The account’s sales pursuit had come to a grinding halt because of a lack of access to specialized business resources, resulting in very stressed teams and lower revenues. Using our proprietary sales flow control methodology, we quickly fixed this problem. We implemented sales project planning and tracking, developed timely and consistent communications, managed updates to the stakeholder network including the customer and managed the customer workshops and briefings.
You could sell more, build better customer relationships and drive more revenue.
The Results
What does this mean in terms of increased revenues? For a moment, let’s go back to the findings of the State of Sales Productivity 2015 study and assume sales productivity improved in 2016 and sales reps now spend 40% of their time on selling. Looking at a typical account team with 10 sales people each working 40 hours per week, this means that the entire team spends only 160 of 400 hours per week selling. If accelerating sales workflows improved this productivity so that the team was spending 50% of their time selling, this would translate to an additional 40 hours per week for the team. This equates to adding a full time salesperson to the team!
Think about what you could do with the newly-free time to sell more, build better customer relationships and drive more revenue.
Contact Sales Beacon to find out more about how our Sales Pass service can help you close deals faster.
About WBE Canada
WBE Canada is Canada’s leading advocate of women business enterprises as suppliers to North America’s corporations. It isCanada’s premier third-party certifier of businesses owned, managed, and controlled by women, certifying Canadian WBEs since March 2009.