Triggering sales productivity by Understanding Return-on-Effort

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There is much talk these days of a need for better, deeper, integration of marketing and sales. In my view, it’s desperately needed, but must be done in ways that address the underlying reason why executives are demanding it – they want a higher return on investment (ROI) from marketing and sales. At its core, this requires finding ways to improve the return-on-effort (ROE) in sales.

In recent years, marketing automation, sales enablement, and Sales 2.0 tools have helped marketing and sales teams be more informed and efficient. Despite these advances, declines in sales productivity continue (according to CSO Insights, quota attainment declined, again, in 2009). There’s a need for marketing and sales to combine expertise and resources in new ways that actually fix this underlying sales productivity problem. In my view, this requires that marketing and sales find ways to create:

• more helpful selling processes
• simpler, smarter, user experiences for sales reps
• better metrics on the impacts of sales efforts

From my perspective, new buyer-centric (self-service) sales models have negatively affected the buyer experience. Ask someone who’s trying to buy something from another business today to identify the thing that’s hardest for them to find these days and they’ll tell you it’s … help. Now that help is a scarce resource, if it’s offered in abundance by sales people to buyers who’d most appreciate it, I believe buyers will notice. In noticing, my bet is that buyers will do something extraordinary – they’ll engage in the process. They’ll reward sales effort with a buyer action. It’s an important first step. It’s also, from research done by McKinsey, a money-making strategy.

The second key to improving sales productivity is to give sales people much simpler views of the massively useful information now available. Today, in many sales teams, there’s an all-you-can eat 24/7 information buffet in play. There’s so much work to be done, and so much information available with which to do it, that important callbacks aren’t occurring. Often it’s because sales people don’t have the time to call. In some cases, they’re flooded with so much information that they’re missing opportunities to re-engage with interested buyers who, with a bit of help, would buy.

In my experience, the more information sales reps have the less of it they’ll ever consume. Barry Trailer’s noted the same in CSO Insight’s formula for sales productivity. What’s needed therefore are interfaces that reduce the flow of information to sales people and add some smarts to the information that’s flowing. What’s needed are interfaces that make it much easier for sales people to understand everything that’s going on and then choose, wisely, where best to invest their efforts. In my experience, when Sales Reps’ can make smart choices, easily, of what to do next, and with whom, their efforts have more impact. It’s an important second step.

The third key to improving sales productivity is measuring, in the aggregate, the impacts of selling efforts. In my view we’ve come to a point where our ability to measure content consumption and do clever things with it (like lead scoring) is really impressive. Being helpful, however, requires sales conversations, not just content consumption. In my view, this requires new metrics that reveal the impact of conversational sales efforts. Metrics which reveal, for instance:

• How many good sales conversations the sales team is having every day (based on what prospects go on to do after a sales conversation ends)
• Behavior-based conversions of prospects through the sales funnel. This means a shift away from measuring, for instance, how many proposals the sales team produced today to measuring, instead, how many prospects read proposals today.
• What marketing and sales activities are triggering the highest and fastest impacts from sales efforts.

When it’s clear what impacts conversational sales efforts are having, marketing and sales will improve impacts, together. Silos between marketing and sales will disappear. They’ll innovate in ways that improve sales productivity. It’s an important third step.

I’ve been privileged to witness the impacts on sales productivity of doing these three things, and doing them all at once. They’re seeding improvements in the return-on-effort for both marketing and sales. It’s what keeps me coming into the office every day.

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As a postscript on the above, McKinsey’s found when retailers improve the helpfulness of their customer’s experience, conversions from browsing to buying increase 1.5 – 2 times.