Unlocking Productivity Potential

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>> Gary: Hi, my name is Gary Hutchfonter assumed spelling, I'm with Sony Power TV assumed spelling. Today we have the pleasure of meeting with Simon Frewer he's the senior engagement manager with the Sales Executive Council. Welcome Simon.

>> Simon: Pleasure to be here Gary.

>> Gary: Your organization does a lot of research on sales productivity and you share the study with us unlocking productivity potential. How did that study come about?

>> Simon: Well our organization's done a lot of work with some of the world's leading sales organizations over the past six or seven years. And for that entire time, we've been studying different types of selling models, different types of organizations, really trying to understand what makes the best selling organizations the best out there. After about five or six years of doing this work many of our organizations were coming to us and saying, please help us understand what are the key drivers and barriers of sales force performance, what have you learned in your years working in this field?

>> Gary: So what is the typical performance metrics, give me one thing that they have looked at.

>> Simon: Sure, well actually the first place when you're thinking about performance metrics it's what you're returning to the organization. So your revenue. That's obviously the first place

>> Gary; Right.

>> Simon: That organizations start. What a lot of our research shows is that's probably not far enough to go in terms of if you really want to understand what do your high performers do differently and what are the most important metrics for me to be understanding, you need to go much further than just understanding revenue for a number of different reasons that we can get into.

>> Gary: Do you measure goal against performance, actual performance?

>> Simon: Yes. So we would measure a number of different things. We would recommend an organization that you have a percentage to goal, understand against goal, how are individuals performing, you want to understand revenue, what's coming in the door, you definitely want to understand the margin that each individual person's delivering. Those are some of the financial output metrics. But what's also really important for organizations to understand is what are some of the behavioral metrics, what are the, sort of the input metrics if you will for individual selling professionals.

>> Gary: Here's what interests me.

>> Simon: Yeah.

>> Gary: Is normally a company has twenty percent top performers, sixty percent core performers, and twenty percent bottom performers. Can the organization learn from every one of those levels? Or are there certain levels you shouldn't look at?

>> Simon: Great question. I mean you can learn obviously from any single level within the organization. What our research has shown is what's most important is to understand what are your top performers doing differently than everybody else?

>> Gary: Okay.

>> Simon: When I say top performers, I'm not just saying sort of the handful of individuals who time and time again knock the ball out of the park in terms of their results.

>> Gary: Right.

>> Simon: They really look at the top ten to twenty percent of individuals

>> Gary: Right.

>> Simon: In the organization. And the reason you want to do that is because if you're only looking at the handful of top two percent, the handful of individuals who really have the best numbers, those are not the type of individuals that you can replicate their behaviors across the entire sales force in a sustainable way. So what you want to do is you want to learn from that top twenty percent, so people have both the skill and the will to get the job done, capture what it is that they do differently, how they're spending their time, how they're interacting with the entire ecosystem that you've put around them as a sales professional, and share those lessons with the rest of the organization.

>> Gary: Well by reading through your material, I've found that the two things that are very interesting. One is that top performers usually have the mental scorecard in their mind where their qualified prospects in a different way than other people, maybe they were an intuitive or a seizing an opportunity. Whereas some sales people do a poor job and either misread the opportunity in terms of high potential or low potential and then miss their chance of making that sale.

>> Simon: Sure well one of the things that we do now, and this study shows, is that the top performers, the highest performers in most sales organizations, in terms of how they spend their time, it's very different. And it goes right to some of the points you're just making. They spend a lot more time on those pre-selling type of activities, there's qualification activities, doing a lot of research before actually engaging the customer or the prospect in a sale. And by doing a lot of that qualification, they're able to really focus their time, their energy, their effort on those accounts, those prospects that will deliver the greatest results.

>> Gary: So they know how to differentiate quick and better and distinguish a good opportunity from a not so good opportunity.

>> Simon: Exactly, they're great at doing that and then the way to think about it is the best time to lose a deal is lose it early and move on to the next one

>> Gary: Exactly.

>> Simon: And don't waste your time. And that's what the best sales people do differently.

>> Gary: Also there's a different data point that comes to my mind that the CSO inside found that the, about thirty-two percent of all opportunities pursued by sales people end in no sale, meaning that nobody bought.

>> Simon: Absolutely.

>> Gary: The sale didn't get lost to the competition, the sale got lost to, you know, a customer that was interested but faked the interest.

>> Simon: Absolutely just trying to gain additional information.

>> Gary: Right.

>> Simon: And again, to the point we were making earlier high performers are great at identifying those types of situations,

>> Gary: Right.

>> Simon: Qualifying those out as fast as possible.

>> Gary: So we're going to continue our conversation tomorrow with Simon where we explore, dig a little deeper into what makes high performance tick and how you can apply this to your sales organization.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====