The job of sales has never been tougher, as customers become increasingly sophisticated and demanding and the line separating products, services and "solutions" blurs. How is sales doing in this complicated environment? And how could it do better?
To find out, we conducted the Forum Sales Effectiveness Study, in which we interviewed 111 senior sales executives in 96 major corporations across 17 industries around the world. All the companies had strong sales organisations. Forty-two of them were listed as "most admired" by Fortune magazine, and five were ranked among the top 15 sales forces by Selling Power magazine.
We asked the executives to rate their sales forces’ performance on a variety of metrics, including revenue, profitability, account development and retention. We then asked them to rate their sales organisation and describe in detail its management capability, the quality of its processes and systems, the sales force’s skill and the organisational culture. The picture wasn’t pretty. In general, the executives were underwhelmed by their sales forces’ performance, even though their teams were reputedly among the world’s best. On a 10-point scale, the executives gave their sales forces an average grade of 7, or about a C-minus. Roughly a third of sales executives rated their forces below 7, about a third ranked them between 7 and 7.9, roughly a quarter rated them between 8 and 8.9, and only a tenth gave their sales forces the equivalent of an A (9 or higher).
This finding is consistent with other studies that show executives’ lack of confidence in sales. (A 2004 Accenture survey, for example, found that out of 178 executives polled, 56 per cent saw their sales force’s performance as "average, worse than normal or catastrophic."
What made the difference for higher-performing sales forces? With the possible exception of their superior ability to find new customers, there was no single capability that gave high performers the edge.