“Sales is a numbers game” — only a percentage of sales calls will succeed, so make enough calls and you’ll be OK, right? This strategy is the heart of a Sales VP’s activity plan to hit quota.
But what if the CEO or CFO is looking at Sales expenses on a P&L with shrinking gross profits, flat revenue, or worse, negative numbers at the bottom? What reductions would one expect for the Sales organization? Cut heads? Chop marketing funds? Reduce travel? You may have already taken these hits. What else can you do to lower your expenses? I’m suggesting that you consider the numbers game to be more than just “at bats”. By also lowering your “error rate” — through a better sales process – you will reduce your selling expenses and make more net profit.
As a professional in The S.A.L.E.S. Network, you are probably part of a solution sales organization that requires collaboration among a variety of positions: Marketing, Inside Sales, Field Sales, Sales Engineers, Professional Services, to name a few. When your company started, one person may have worn many hats. Over time, new hires took on specialist roles as the company scaled up in size. How well they all communicated together had not been the top priority. A bad economy changed all that. Now the attention is on doing more with less.
If your team doesn’t have a common language you may be part of an inefficient, pricey operation that makes these errors:
– 5-minute huddles turn into 90-minute conference calls;
– Ambiguous statements of work require re-do’s and wasted cycles;
– Unqualified opportunities drain resources before being discovered as fruitless.
SOLUTION business models require COLLABORATION made efficient through a COMMON LANGUAGE. Whether you MAKE or BUY a common language, just do it. Without it you are already paying for the inefficiency with a higher error rate.
In my research, I’m measuring the costs of NOT having a common sales language….similar to measuring the cost of your computer network crashing. So if you have horror stories, or success stories, I’d like to hear them.