What are some of the best techniques to make sales teams more efficient and effective?

Hank: This is really an important question. Increasingly the selling and marketing processes becoming very intertwined-so this issue extends far beyond the selling team and will increasingly include the marketing engagement.

I think there are a few critical elements to driving the effectiveness and efficiency in engaging the customer and working with them through their buying process. I think the foundation to this are well defined sales and marketing processes. These provide a baseline which is developed based on really understanding your best practices/experiences. Without these processes, you don't know how to look at or even measure sales effectiveness and efficiency.

Once we have these processes in place--we can, with experience start tuning and refining them for increased effectiveness and efficiency. For example, just looking at the sales proces (yeah I know I'm contradicting myself), as a sales person, I leverage the process in each deal---but I always have to look at how I can increase my probability of winning, compress the cycle, increase my average transaction value/deal profitability. I do this in each deal over time driving my personal productivity and effectiveness. Managers do the same thing, looking across the team leveraging best practices from a team wide perspective.

In a related area, where historically the marketing process fed the sales process and they were viewed as relatively sequential, the new world of selling (look at concepts like Challenger and Provocative Selling), they are very intertwined. This leads to another important notion in driving efficiency and effectiveness of both the marketing and sales organization---you have to have very clearly defined roles and responsibilities mapped to each element of the engagement process. The key issue here is who/how best to we most effectively handle this part of the process.

These are the cornerstones to driving effectiveness and efficiency. There are lots of tools to help do this. Actually a lot of the classic tools and analytic approaches from the Quality movement are very powerful here.

Once you've developed the processes, roles, responsibilities, best practices, then you can start overlaying a number of very powerful systems and software tools to drive effectiveness and efficiency even further---but this step must follow-not precede the others. As you well know, too often we implement software and systems tools without this, only to find that we've failed to achieve what we want.

Great question Hank! Thanks for posing it.

I want to focus on the "MORE" effective, assuming the team is doing all the good stuff we all learned in the past 10+ years about reference selling, strategic selling, or whatever else is out there since eons ;) [NOTE: Lori and a few others show how desperate they are to get that old methodologies into the market]

I found that integrating existing customers into the sales process - way beyond the reference selling part - a key component in being more effective.

Customers in aggregate have typically more experience then the best service teams. Customers who made a conscious and well educated purchase decision are way more convincing than the best sales person on the planet. Customers bring a good deal of sanity check into project time lines. For instance: if you recommend a 6 month implementation phase knowing it is very tight and the new customer pushes for 4 month - let an existing customer argue why even 6 month is a total stress rather that your sales person is arguing ;) Bring existing customers in as a "project adviser" and give them an official and publicly visible recognition as such. Invite the new customers into a respective online community, and of course don't limit the social interaction to the golf club - have not only the sales team but the entire team socialize with the client.

With having existing customers come into the equation there are a few most haves:
1) Sales people who are conditioned to rigorously follow a sales process, probably freak out. So they need to be retrained
2) Sales VPs who have the sales process nailed down to the n-th degree will probably fail in this environment (they can't let go)
3) General customer experience models and a broader and more social engagement from the entire company is required to create that positive customer experience needed to integrate customers into the mix.

But hey - there is no free lunch and you want to go beyond where everybody else already went - right?

Axel
http://XeeMe.com/AxelS

“Team Selling” is, as you so rightly say, becoming increasingly important in Complex Selling.

When we go from Individual endeavour to Team work lots of things have to change.
I will take your two key words separately; “efficiency” is how much work we can do in a fixed period of time. How many Customer Contacts we can achieve in a week, how many Proposals we write or how many Demonstrations we give. In order for a Sales Team or “Team Selling” to become more efficient you have to MEASURE what you do, and how long it takes. Then you COMPARE or bench mark against others and strive to increase productivity.

“Effectiveness” is how successful are you?
Again you have to MEASURE, How many Demonstrations resulted in an order, or how many Proposals led to a Sales. COMPARE your results to a TARGET, and change HOW you do it to improve.

“Team Selling” requires Coordination and Cooperation, in the popular idiom “Alignment” but IMO its better to "Coordinate", which means planning and communicating throughout the “Sales Team”. Then by sharing Goals, Values and Targets enables "Cooperation", after all in a Team it’s contributing your Strengths as “account managers, technical specialists, industry experts, solution experts, and more.” that counts. Not WHO is present but HOW can they help?

Thats a very customer centric leading question. :)

Why not get the customer to sell to you rather than the other way around? My time is just as important as theirs, in fact I'd go as far as to say its more important to me than their time is to them so I want a good reason to spend more time developing specific value for them.

I'm yet to meet a good salesperson who thrives in a top down rigid sales process environment. Create an incentive package that incentivises the results the company wants, give people the tools they ask for and get rid of all red tape in the way of them busting their targets.

Everything else you do is wasting time and effort.

http://beatingtarget.com

Hi Hank;

Create a decision engine for your strategic sales reps, reflecting historical client value delivered,
empowering your reps to consistently present to their prospects, your business reason to buy, in real time using your prospects numbers

Essentially, provide them a web based, interactive toolset, that immediately shows prospects what's in it for them (their business reason to buy):
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http://mcdonaldsalesandmarketing.biz/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Decision-Engi...
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http://mcdonaldsalesandmarketing.biz/sales-performance-4/

I'd say the single biggest thing an organization can do is adopt a web based product-centric CRM such as http://rocware.com/

A service like Rocware enables your sales team to build meaningful relationships with both existing customers and prospects by inviting them to view your business's product offerings via a private connection. The "private connection" is especially important when selling b2b as it enables you to be able to share customer specific wholesale pricing as an integrated component of your online catalog. By connecting with both existing and prospective customers via an easy to use product-centric CRM you will both increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team while simultaneously better servicing your customers and increasing sales.