20. Poll #2
Within your organization, what is the
average amount of hours reps
actually spend selling, on a weekly
basis (40 hr. work week)?
Less than 10
11 - 15
16 - 20
21 - 25
25 - 30
31+
21. How the Sales Team Spends Its Time
5 hours/week in CRM
3 hours/week in Internal Meetings
4 hours/week Supporting Clients
5 hours/week Researching Clients
4 replying to Non-Sales Related Emails
= 21 hours Non-Selling | 19 hours Sales
Time
23. You Need To:
1. Cut out all non-essential
time investments for the
reps
1. Create a sales process that
is consistent across reps
1. Measure this all on a
weekly basis to ensure that
you are making progress
24.
25. Time Savings
1. Researches tools to reduce manual CRM data entry
2. Looks to limit meetings that include reps
3. Looks to limit support issues coming into sales
4. Researches prospecting tools to help reps with research
and creating lead lists
5. Looks into email filtering solutions for reps
26. Effectiveness & Efficiency Measures
1. Meets with sales process consultants (with goal of
achieving more predictable sales outcomes)
2. Considers changes to CRM (lock in sales process)
3. Works with Marketing to create an ICP
4. Asks Marketing to interview clients (learn how they like
to buy)
27.
28. How Tom recommends saving time
1. Use CRM automation tool that will lower CRM admin by 4
hours/week
2. Limit Salespeople to 1-hour sales meeting per week
3. Update sales process/support structure to reduce
customer support to <30 minutes per week
4. Employ prospecting tool to decreases research by 70%
5. Institute email filtering solution that shows reps only emails
related to sales opportunities
Total potential time saved per week 15.8 hours/rep
29. How Tom addresses Effectiveness & Efficiency
1.Hire a sales process expert to create a consistent
sales playbook
2.Make necessary adjustments in CRM to help
facilitate this process
3.Create an Ideal Client Profile (ICP) to help focus
reps on the right prospects
30. Effectiveness & Efficiency Impact
Estimated Effectiveness
Impact:
• Close ratio normalizes to 32%
• Avg deal size normalizes to
$17(k)
• Deals lost at the demo phase
decrease from 56% to 20%
Efficiency impact from
updated sales process:
• Closed/won stays at 34
days
• Closed/lost drops to 20
days
31.
32.
33. Resources for you
• Sales Leaders Guide to Sales Force
Productivity (includes the Sales
Productivity Rating Model)
• Daily productivity checklist for sales
people
• Predictable Revenue – Aaron Ross’s
Book
• Salesforce Productivity Infographic
• Hubspot Sales Productivity Research
@seanburkeh
seanhburke
34. Tools to Check Out
Research
Charlie App
LinkedIn
Predictive Analytics
Infer
6sense
InsightSquared
Sales Prospecting - KiteDesk
Prospecting & Research
CRM automatic syncing
Ideal Client Profiles
Email filtering
Social Selling
Hinweis der Redaktion
For those of you expecting a typical webinar – I’m sorry to disappoint you – we aren’t going to do that today.
Instead I’d like to tell you a story. This story, while fictional, is all based on issues I have personally experienced working with different sales teams over that last 20 years.
Before we get to the story…I’d like for you to take down my twitter account information and my LinkedIn contact information. If you connect with me on these networks – I will connect back. And if there is something that I can help you with – please let me know.
Please let me know that you attended this event so I will have a context for our connection. Don’t be shy – I’m Happy to do it!
OK – let’s begin!
Slide 1 - So we start with a Sales Team (our characters):
Jane is the VP of Sales
Tom is the head of sales ops – he’s got his back towards us
Carleen is a SMB Rep – she is located on Janes right hand side
Jake is an SDR – He is sitting to Tom’s right
They are all a part of the typical sales team you’d find at any mid sized B2B company throughout the US.
Slide 2 -
Jane thinks that sales is doing ok. Their team operates similar to other sales teams. on any given month 40-60 percent of the team hits their numbers. Most times a big deal comes in at the end of the quarter and they squeak by. But some quarters that doesn’t happen and they miss by a mile.
She knows that things could be better but for the most part she feels that things are OK.
Jane doesn’t think much of it until her CEO Jacqueline calls her into her office one day and says - the following: I’ve been doing some research on your team and have found some disturbing news:
Your quarter over quarter performance variance is 24%
Your team’s time to close ranges from 8 days to 6 months for similar sized deals
You lose 32% of your team members each and every year
Jane this is a problem that you have to fix. You need to seriously address your entire teams sales productivity - and you need to do it quickly. Our investors want to see a sales model that is scalable and predictable.
Jane brings the team together and shares the bad news. They discuss productivity and for the most part the team agrees that everything is ok.
Everyone agrees – that is for Tom – the head of Sales Ops
Slide 5 - Tom says - I knew this day would come...sorry Jane, I’ve been giving you warnings about this for a long time - but today is the day that we will need to address this - Jane we’ve actually had a sales productivity issue for a long time. But it’s never been addressed.
If we miss a quarter – we usually make it next quarter. And our sales turnover is always used as an excuse as to why we missed our numbers. Plus we have a a few sales heroes that make up the difference in what the poorer performers miss
Slide 6 - Jane says “What do you mean?” We’ve met our annual numbers the last 3 years. Doesn’t that prove that we are productive?
Slide 7- Tom says - well that’s just it - Sales Productivity across the board is bad - here are some stats...it’s not just us...but Jacqueline doesn’t care.
Sales people spend 4 hours (10% of their time) updating their CRM/week
In a recent report – only 33% of sales peoples time is spent selling
16% of reps time is spent on post sales support
19% of their time is spent on searching and gathering information
Sales people handle over 600 emails on a weekly basis
In most sales orgs – it takes longer to lose a deal then win it
Slide 8 - Jane looks frustrated. “so what do we do?” Tom says I have an idea…
I think the best way for us to proceed is to use a model to see where we fit related to optimal sales performance. Once we know where we are at – we can then do some analysis to see what changes need to be made – then we can make those changes…
Sound like a plan?
The team all shakes their heads yes.
Slide 9 - Tom says let’s take a look at this Sales Productivity Rating model –
On the left hand side is effectiveness – which is all about our results – if we are strong on effectiveness then we hit our results regularly and predictably. It tells us if we are doing the right things
Across the bottom is efficiency – this is all about if we are doing things correctly. For example – within each step of our sales process are we optimizing our movement through this step. Many companies call this sales acceleration
So where do you think we fit?
They all point to the bottom left...see that’s the issue we need to be in the upper right...that’s the goal. So--what do we do?
Slide 10 - Tom - says - give me a week - I’ll come back to you with my game plan.
Slide 11 – First Tom meets with Jake who is a Sales Development Representative. He asks Jake questions like:
Show me how you spent your time
Where are you encountering road blocks
Walk me through your standard processes
What’s working / what isn’t
Jake gives him all the details he needs to understand a week in the life of an SDR
Slide 12 - Tom meets with Carleen and asks her the same thing – he asks her a lot of the same questions as Jake – but spends more time talking through the entire sales process since Carleen actually walks deals all the way through to closure
Slide 13 - Tom even meets with Marketing to get their input. He tries to dig into how they are generating leads, what makes a great client, how they push leads to sales…
Marketing shares that they are very campaign driven and many times their lead flow will see drastic increases and decreases based on events that they are either running or attending.
Slide 14 - Before the week is up - Jane pulls Tom aside and says that Jacqueline just told her that she not only wants to see his game plan - but also - what the impact will be based on his recommendations. He needs to have a methodology or defendable thought process on how he addresses sales productivity
Tom thinks – this is great…now I’m on the hook for estimating the impact of my suggestions too – I should have never raised my hand…
Slide 15 – As you would expect – Tom is working some late hours trying to help not only identify their productivity issues – but now he has the added task of estimating the impact. As he is burning the midnight oil the CFO stops by. Tom shares his project concerns with the CFO and get’s his feedback.
Slide 16 - CFO says - productivity is a function of doing the right things (effective), doing things correctly - or in the case of sales (are you predictably closing deals) (efficient) - are you moving deals through the sales cycle rapidly and maximizing your time spent doing results driven work. So if Tom wants to show a methodology - he can break his recommendations into those groupings
Since Tom is already heading down this path – he feels relieved that he started with a model and then drilled down into the details from there.
Slide 17 –
As the CFO leaves – Tom reviews some of his interview notes.
Time - Based on his interviews here is how (on average) his sales team spends their time:
5 hours/week in SFDC
3 hours/week in internal meetings
4 hours a week supporting clients
5 hours/week researching clients
4 replying to non-sales related emails
The rest is on sales
=21 hours non-selling; 19 hours selling
Slide 18
Then he reviews the ranges in performance of the team
Effective
The close ratios variations between reps ranges from 14% - 45% - this tells me that we do not have a consistent sales process, or our lead quality varies widely. Or we track deals inconsistently. It could be a lot of things
56% of all deals are lost at the demo phase – If we are losing so many deals at the demo phase – we must be doing our demos wrong.
Deal sizes range from $1500/year - $50,000/year – this tells me we target a wide segment of clients and we need to sell to them differently
Efficient
Time to close varies from 20 days - 65 days – given our deal size range – this makes sense – smaller deals should close faster
Close won deals take 34 days – this isn’t too bad for deals over $10k but for $1500 deals – it seems a bit long
Close lost deals take 92 days – Holy cow – this is a problem
Slide 19 - Tom is not exactly sure what this all means - so he goes and meets with the CFO. CFO tells him the following:
Tom this is great data that you have pulled together – here is my quick read on this:
You need to cut out all non-essential time investments for the reps
You have to create a sales process that is consistent across reps
You have to measure this all on a weekly basis to ensure that you are making progress – the time to lose deals is way out of line – that is a problem that needs to be fixed
Slide 20 – Tom’s feeling pretty good know – he feels like he has his arms around what he needs to do.
So what he does is: - NEXT SLIDE
Slide 22
First he looks at ways to cut non-essential work from the sales team:
Researches tools that will reduce the manual effort of updating CRM
Looks into all meetings held that include sales reps to try to find ways to limit their involvement
Find ways to lesson support issues coming into sales
Researches prospecting tools to help do research and lead list creation for reps
Looks into email filtering solutions for reps to handle the massive amounts of emails they deal with
Slide 23
Next he investigates how to improve sales effectiveness and efficiency
So he
Talks to sales process consultants to see what can be done to create more predictable sales outcomes
Looks into changes he can make in their CRM to lock in sales process gates
Works with marketing to create a more tightly defined Ideal Client Profile
Has marketing interview clients on how they like to buy
Slide - 21 – Tom has to show results so as he thinks through how he will present his findings – he doodles this simple visual that shows that by attacking productivity from these three vantage points – utlimately the results will come
So – here is what he recommends to save time
Next he suggest that they address effectiveness and efficiency by…
His estimates is that by taken these actions over the next 6 months they should see these results.
Also – by reporting on these weekly – they will ensure that they stay the course and make the necessary changes
Slide 22 –
Tom’s ideas are spot on and Jane knows it. Jane is thrilled with his analysis - so in her mind Tom saves the day – she feels empowered and prepared to present his case to the CEO.
Slide 23 -
Jane shows Jacquelinethe plan and she is impressed. She agrees to move forward with Tom’s recommendations primarily because he was smart enough to recommend weekly measurement of their progress.
Tools
Charlie App for research
LinkedIn for research
Predictive Analytics
Infer
6sense
Analytics - insightsqured
Sales Prospecting - KiteDesk
CRM automatic syncing
Email filtering
Research
Social Selling
ICP