What are some examples of "noise" that is hurting the ability of sales people to work better?

Lauren, I'm going to cut against the grain a little.

Turn your "smart phones" off to be "smarter" and focus on the task at hand. Turn them off while prospecting, in meetings, when face-to-face with customers. Turn them on when you're "free" to take and make calls.

Emails in your inbox can wait until you finish whatever task your doing.

Focus on one task at a time and do each one well with laser focused precision instead of multitasking with adequate results.

Sales people are barraged with information from an ever-increasing number of sources. I recently did a site map for a large technology company and stopped when the counter hit 1000 pages with 80% of the timer bar remaining... How is a sales person expected to find the content that is truly of value to him amongst all this stuff? This is where the noise is. There is too much content, most of which has nothing to do with what the sales person needs at a particular time. What happens? The sales person gives up looking for anything new and useful, and, instead, relies on what he already knows.

Don't get hijacked by a vendor trying to sell a sales enablement system as a means to overcoming these problems. Sales enablement system vendors want to sell you a system first, and see you succeed as a result. The truly credible sales enablement system vendor will want to see your company succeed first, and if their product is the right fit, will work with you to maximize its effective and valuable deployment. It is unfortunate that sales enablement systems, sold in the guise of a knowledge management solution, are not solutions, merely repositories. VP's of Sales who are tasked with deploying such solutions want to check the check box and move on. It is crucial, for a sales enablement program to work and truly add value to an organization, measurable in revenue dollars and margins, that time is invested to understand the actual needs of a sales and marketing team, with help from professionals on this topic, and only then make an educated decision on solution selection.

Without this effort, more emphasis on deploying sales enablement "solutions" will only add to the noise.

Great responses already here addressing the major sources of noise!

From my experience, the worst source of noise is the increasing information overload of unstructured, redundant content which is provided by different sources and in different ways. Everybody wants to help sales to sell – exactly the opposite is true. That's what Forrester calls “random acts of sales support”. You can find these “random acts” everywhere, sales content is just one big topic - one that can create a lot of noise, if it's not consolidated, structured and managed strategically.
Let's have a look why so many companies have so many sales portals – because they have different groups which feel responsible to help sales! But there is another source: the variety of different views on a company's product and service portfolio which is often the driver for the portal landscape!
Before starting to think about how technology could help to reduce the content noise – consolidate and structure your product portfolio. Then have a look on the content and let's figure out how technology could add business value because “a fool with a tool is still a fool”. I totally agree to Mike's statements.

For those of you who are interested in a deep dive into that topic:
http://community.forrester.com/message/11886#11886

Short version: Create a value vision what your sales enablement platform should deliver. Is that about sales efficiency, about reduced search time, more consistent messages, tailored content along the buying cycle, etc. Consider all roles that are relevant: all people touching your customers, which means all content consuming and all content contributing people.
Then, design the information architecture from a sales perspective, analyze and inventory your current content, categorize and define content types and throw away all redundant, out-dated stuff which is no longer relevant! That requires a brave program team and leadership, leadership and leadership because your are also closing down previous portals! It's worth it – less is more, and quality comes first! Third establish a role based content governance including content life cycle management to avoid that you implement again new sources of potential noise. Then, focus on sales adoption, sales adoption and sales adoption – people have to be trained on how to use such systems efficiently, take them on that change journey. It makes absolutely no sense to implement a platform like this and to think “okay fine - delivered according to the check list”.

In parallel, the variety of different trainings to help sales to sell, offered by different internal and external groups can create also a lot of noise. The result: sales reps try to avoid these trainings.

Other sources of noise are administration and reporting, e.g. manually driven reports which are focused on activities, and not on sales results.

Complex internal processes to get SME's on a deal – often underestimated! Ask your sales reps how many time they spend on identifying and finally on getting SME's on their deals.

Finally, I totally agree to Ellen's statement on selling internally:
That's often harder than selling externally. If you ever see that problem, check all the processes, the deal boards and the sales cycle stages, something must be wrong. It can never be valuable, not for the customers and not for the own profitability, if sales reps need more time to sell their deals internally than externally.

I would add to the above, what I'll call 'button noise'.

Walk by a sales person's desk sometime. Ask yourself what the ratio is between their button clicks with their mouse + the number of times they're 'clicking with a customer' (ie hitting a hot button, in conversation, with a buyer).

To me, that ratio is seriously flawed.

Trust this adds some value. - John