While it’s still early, the market rumblings of the past few weeks are starting to give rise to concerns in B2B sales and marketing circles about the uncertainties that lie ahead. According to a survey just released by LEAPJob, Sales Reps are beginning to defer their own major purchase plans.
Ironically, the latest issue of the HBR includes a cartoon that hints at the dark humor we can expect. As the presentor speaks to the sharp drop in results, a colleague chimes in: “By golly Jones, I like your optimism. I didn’t know we had a 5th quarter!”
If the pace of change is likely to quicken, the best response in our view is to quicken the pace with which change can be detected. sales productivity data that arrive on a week-to-week basis, with performance reviews month-to-month (or quarter to quarter) will leave companies badly exposed. Further, if the precision and speed of those data rely on the precision and frequency of Sales Rep input, there’s much to fear in the imprecisions and lag times that are likely.
Our bias is to automatically capture new real-time data on sales productivity, delivered as a result of prospect behaviors (rather than Sales Reps’ impressions or efforts). It’s a shift away from focusing on how many contracts the sales team has produced, towards a focus on how many prospects have read contracts.
Such data deliver several benefits. First, any shifts in a company’s sales trajectory are clear with no lag time (as in this example). Second, the data are comparable across the full sales team and across time. Observed trends are real trends (while the inflection in a prospect’s voice can be misleading, their behaviors won’t lie). Third, armed with the confidence that the trends they’re seeing are real, sales teams can respond much faster to market conditions (as occured in this example).
Real-time sales productivity data won’t make market conditions any more certain, but they will reduce the risk that downward trends will be unknown or ignored. In our experience, the faster a sales team knows about the actual impacts their efforts are having with prospects, the higher the odds are that they will find new ways of engaging their target markets well in advance of their competitors (who will still be blindly hoping things don’t turn out as ugly as they feared).
