5 Steps to Simpler, More Effective SellingAt many organizations, sales reps only receive performance feedback as part of the company’s standard review process. This approach to sales

Steps to Simpler, More Effective Selling5

1E B O O K : 5 S T E P S T O S I M P L E R , M O R E E F F E C T I V E S E L L I N G

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: How Effective is Your Reps’ Selling Time? 25 Sales Productivity Killers 4 1. Making the Sales Team Hunt Their Own Food 5 2. Inadequate Tools for Managing a Complex Portfolio 7 3. Manual Processes That Slow Quote Approval 10 4. Generic Annual Performance Reviews 12 5. Spending Too Much Time On Product Training 15Using Technology to Drive Productivity 17

Benefits of Greater Sales Productivity 19Summary 20


Introduction: How Effective is Your Reps’ Selling Time?

When you consider the demands and expectations placed on B2B salespeople today, it gives you a new appreciation for your top performers.

A successful sales rep is more than just a product expert; the rep is an expert on their customers’ businesses, industry trends and the competition. For each of your customers, a rep calls on the organization and works to develop relationships both deep and wide, helping your company become a trusted partner instead of being merely a transactional supplier.

They also take on the task of actually creating quotes and getting prices that will close deals. Sales reps build business cases, help negotiate contracts, manage responses to opportunities, handle


customer escalations, provide constant updates and reporting, and act as a conduit to customers for the marketing and executive teams.

While juggling all of these tasks, your salespeople are also expected to increase net promoter scores and deliver an increase over last year’s revenue and margin numbers.

All of this takes time. Time that your reps and customers don’t have. Research shows that 50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds first. And the slower you are to respond, the greater the danger your customers will take their business somewhere else – or to an e-commerce channel where they can research and buy what they need without ever interacting with a human being. It’s tough to compete with that if you don’t have the latest tools and efficient, effective selling.


When your sales team consistently delivers target revenue and margins, your entire organization benefits — from the individual reps to the shareholders. Keeping everyone focused on the target and ensuring data is being used to drive decision making results in better outcomes that fuel an upward spiral of business success. And since competitive salespeople want to work for successful companies, a reputation for productivity and success gives your sales organization access to the best talent, too.

Those benefits are beyond the reach of many organizations, however, due to major productivity killers hidden in their midst. Could one of these five problems be holding your company back?

5 Productivity Killers Hindering You From Your Sales Goals.


1. Making the Sales Team Hunt Their Own Food

When the sales team has to drum up their own demand in addition to capturing it, reps waste time preparing for and calling on unqualified leads, which is inefficient and ineffective.

This massive productivity killer arises when the marketing team isn’t effective at creating demand. Instead of taking a lead that’s been nurtured by the marketing team, the sales reps have to do all the legwork of finding information, creating materials and then making calls to try to engage prospects. This problem often goes undiagnosed and emerges in different ways, depending on the sales organization.

Danger signs include an incoming call volume that’s below target and an increasing outbound call volume with declining or negligible close rates.

And, if you aren’t investing energy into helping reps learn to sell better to existing customers, you’re missing out. It’s much faster and easier to sell more to someone you already have a relationship with rather than to new prospects and it’s cheaper, too. According to Lee Resource, Inc., attracting new customers will cost your company five times more than keeping an existing customer. Whether it’s selling into additional business units or selling additional products to your current buyers, reps need to think of pursuing the incremental revenue in their existing accounts if they are looking for smart ways to retire quota.


36.6% Sales Reps Spend 36.6% of Time Actually Selling.

Source: InsideSales.com Research: Time Management For Sales

Solutions:

The key is bringing sales, marketing and sales operations together in a proactive way. If

you’re reactionary, your support organizations don’t have time to prepare, which hurts your

sales productivity. One easy way to help sales teams quickly identify new leads is by

leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to automate the identification

and delivery of new opportunities to them. These tools focus on finding these

opportunities within existing customers so sales teams have an even greater probability of

closing these deals. In addition, A.I. tools can also help alert sales teams to customers who

might be about to churn away so they can proactively engage with these customers to

prevent the loss of revenue. The insights are delivered directly into the CRM environment

so each sales rep can instantly evaluate opportunities and take action to either build

relationships, prevent churn or expand the share of wallet with current customers.


2. Inadequate Tools for Managing a Complex Portfolio

For your salespeople to cover a complex product offering, such as highly configurable products, or a large product portfolio or parts catalog, their sales productivity depends in part on having the right tools to manage this complexity in an efficient, effective manner. Otherwise, the cost to your organization could be catastrophic, with the inability to quickly provide accurate product and pricing information to customers, resulting in lost sales.

There are lots of potential problems with managing a complex portfolio. When it takes your reps a long time to create quotes, they can’t respond fast enough and may be losing many opportunities. And when the process is difficult due to complexity, you’re likely to see a high order error rate on the back end.

Many organizations begin to experience this challenge as they expand their product and service offerings or even undergo mergers and acquisitions. One indication of this problem is when a sales organization is using specialized reps that only cover a portion of the portfolio. This leads to high field selling costs relative to the sales revenue. Another symptom of this productivity killer is that your reps are selling a fairly narrow selection of the available products, with low attach rates of accessories and options


Solutions:

To help, Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) tools with guided selling and cross-selling capabilities will make it easier for the sales team to find and create an offer that’s aligned with the specific requirements of each customer. CPQ tools help product management and product marketing to efficiently manage the product and service offerings available for customers to purchase. The great benefit with these tools is that they can also be integrated into a CRM environment and help the sales team to effectively sell your entire portfolio of solutions. For products and services requiring complex configurations, CPQ solutions can help walk even the most novice sales person and ensure that the resulting configuration is valid, eliminating frustrating and embarrassing delays caused by inaccurate quotes.

If you are investing in CPQ for the first time, make sure you invest in a solution that relies on science to both recommend appropriate products and pricing and that can scale as your business grows in size and complexity. It is also important that it’s easy to implement and

Invest in a solution that relies on science to both recommend appropriate products and pricing.


integrate with different offices and regions, as well as with your existing systems – all critical factors in achieving quick ROI.

Your sales partners or channel organizations should also be involved, since they also need the right processes, capabilities and tools to effectively sell your solutions. Of course, your supply chain needs to support this distribution method, coordinating across operations, manufacturing and logistics teams. If you want to extend to additional channels such as e-commerce (and you should), you’ll also want IT involved to ensure the right infrastructure for performance, scalability, security and support.

Source: Gartner Research 2017: Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation

$9.4BGartner forecasts that the SFA (sales force

automation) market will grow to more than

$9.4 billion by 2019.


3. Manual Processes That Slow Quote Approval

Inefficient, manual quoting and approval processes are major productivity killers, making it difficult for your sales team to turn quotes around quickly and win the business. This productivity killer is exacerbated more by slow quote approvals that take several days or even weeks!

When these approvals aren’t happening at the speed of the marketplace, you lose sales opportunities to faster, more agile competitors.

When combining both time spent and effectiveness, account and contact research as well as administrative tasks were identified as the biggest time wasters - tasks taking the

most time and producing the least amount of results.

Source: InsideSales.com Research: Time Management For Sales


Solutions:

Improving sales productivity in this situation requires definition of clear business rules driven into tools that enable automation of the processes. By leveraging your investment in a CPQ tool, you can automate your approval workflow and empower your sales teams to skip the approval process all together if they provide quotes within approved business guidelines. Pricing decisions not within business rule thresholds would be escalated for management review and approval. This approach means reps get the guidance and speed they need and management gets the peace of mind that business rules are being met.

Computing giant Hewlett-Packard reduced its quote turnaround time by 25 percent, with automated approvals for 80 percent of its quotes.


4. Generic Annual Performance Reviews

At many organizations, sales reps only receive performance feedback as part of the company’s standard review process. This approach to sales performance wastes a lot of time. Without timely, relevant, fact-based coaching that helps them boost their skills, it takes far longer to identify and address ways that sales reps could improve. In fact, it can enable less-than-optimal tactics and practices to persist if there isn’t a culture of constant improvement that quickly identities and implements coaching actions.


Solutions:

There are several ways to use performance management to improve your sales productivity. Even if your reps have annual performance reviews based on the standard HR process, consider augmenting them with regular guidance and coaching that draws on sales analytics data.

For the best results, use a mix of public and private performance feedback. Setting competitive metrics that are public and quantifiable provides transparency, allows everyone to participate and creates a foundation for real-time feedback. Private conversations are an opportunity to coach individual reps on specific fact-based ways to improve their selling skills.

Additionally, you can provide transparency that further drives sales performance and aligns sales rep behavior to organizational goals with tools like Xactly Incentive Compensation.

Sales reps can see in real time the financial impact of a pricing decision at the time of quote.


With it, sales reps can see in real time the financial impact of a pricing decision at the time of quote. When a rep can instantly see the impact a deal price will have on both retiring quota their commissions, they can make modifications to both make the sale and maximize their personal benefit. And, when combined with a CPQ solution that uses pricing optimization techniques, improvements in both sales performance and adherence to your business goals quickly follows.

If you’re ready to overhaul your rep performance, it takes a village. Of course, sales leadership needs to drive the change but then quickly enlist the participation of HR, learning and development, and sales ops to drive implementation. Having a coordinated, sustained approach to sales performance management will help ensure it becomes a core competence of your business, or at least the sales team, and removes this potential productivity killer.


5. Spending Too Much Time On Product Training

Sales is a skill set that needs to be developed and building a world-class sales team starts with a group that brings a varying set of experience levels and techniques. Some of those experiences and techniques may require retooling, refinement and constant training to keep up with the changing competitive landscape.

Some products and services are extremely complex to support, thereby creating a need for product managers to spend lots of time hosting training sessions to help sales understand how to position their solutions. This challenge especially plagues companies with configure-to-order and engineer-to-order type catalogues which require the deepest knowledge of product compatibilities.


Solutions:

While your sales process needs to be supported by appropriate onboarding, training and coaching methodologies, you can leverage tools to make it easy for sales teams to configure the most complex offerings without needing lots of training. Invest in tools which also integrate prescriptive analytics so sales teams have real-time insights into which cross sell options products they can position in addition to the main product or service.

To ensure long-term success, all sales reps need to develop a disciplined approach to managing their selling time and consistently follow the team’s sales methodology for calls, opportunity management, and all activities for each stage of the sales and customer buying cycles.

Your sales management also needs training to provide effective oversight and have those one-on-one conversations. Too often, sales managers aren’t prepared to help sales reps with inefficient and unproductive work habits. Reps that don’t find their own solutions get shown the door, which is often a waste of good talent. Sales managers need the ability to engage at the right level and help a sales rep change their behavior and get back on course, or guide that person toward a role better suited to their talents.


If your organization faces one or more of these five productivity killers, the solution is likely to require investment in technology.

Lots of companies are developing solutions for improving sales productivity, but organizations need to be mindful of the end-state they want before investing in technology. You don’t have to take on a two-year project to get this done, but you need an end target so you know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.

Piecemeal solutions aren’t useful— you have to take a holistic, platform perspective to drive sales effectiveness and efficiency. Many companies are starting with CRM and it’s a great technology to get the sales team organized and better managing opportunities. Yet, research is showing the vast majority of companies are not getting revenue or win rate increases from CRM. And almost no one is even talking about margin improvement. Don’t stop at CRM. Extend your investment in CRM with the addition of CPQ that includes opportunity identification, and pricing optimization technologies.

Using Technology to Drive Productivity


Before you invest, make sure the solution you choose can deliver:

Integration into your CRM environments, meaning that your sales teams can easily access the tool from a solution they use on a daily basis.

Flexibility to integrate into multiple CRM and ERPs, meaning you’re never tied down to any investment you make.

A.I. and machine learning to deliver personalized insights about the customer along the sales journey.

Quick deployment and fast ROI.


Source: Gartner Research: Predicts 2018: AI and the Future of Work

In 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity.

6.2B

When you overcome these five sales productivity killers, you unlock significant benefits for your organization. Some of these benefits are quantifiable, when you see how your sales productivity metrics drive increased revenue and margins while also creating a winning environment and upward spiral of business success. A more efficient, effective sales process means lowered costs and increased incremental profitability.

Sales productivity also offers benefits that are more difficult to quantify. These include a positive brand value and reputation within your industry and among the public. People want to work for a successful company with a positive brand image; having that tends to lower employee turnover and gives your sales organization access to the best talent available.

Benefits of Greater Sales Productivity


Summary

PROS understands the best ways to boost sales effectiveness and efficiency, and we’ve been doing so for more than 20 years. Our customers in the automotive & manufacturing, food, high tech & healthcare, insurance, chemicals, and even oil & gas space have successfully accelerated the sales process and reduced quote turnaround time and are enjoying the higher win rates and profitability improvements that come with simpler, effective selling.


About PROSPROS is powering the shift to modern commerce, helping competitive enterprises create a personalized and

frictionless experience for their customers. Fueled by dynamic pricing science, PROS offers solutions that make it

possible for companies to price, configure and sell their products and services with speed, precision and consistency

across sales channels. Our customers are leaders in their markets across more than 10 sectors, and benefit from

decades of data science expertise infused into our industry solutions.

Ready to learn more about using CPQ and pricing guidance to improve your sales process? Visit www.pros.com/blog

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5 Steps to Simpler, More Effective SellingAt many organizations, sales reps only receive performance feedback as part of the company’s standard review process. This approach to sales