Getting to the Root Cause of Sales Problems

A manager who wants to have a winning sales team must constantly ask the question: How should I change my team to reach the next level? In a perfect world, leaders would make necessary changes before a crisis instead of waiting until one happens, but all too often this is not the case. When companies do make changes, they typically gravitate to one of three common solutions:

1. Add more sales people to increase sales revenues
2. Train the sales staff, and
3. Demand more and better leads from marketing

On the surface, these solutions appear reasonable. These solutions play out among the chief parties in a sales organization (Corporate, First Line Managers and sales professionals) in the following ways:

• Corporate says "We need more revenues/sales, so let's hire more sales people."
• Supervisors say "We need more training on prospecting."
• Producers claim "If we had better leads, we would do more business."

In our experience consulting for financial firms, these solutions are often based on false assumptions such as sales volume depends on the size of the sales force; call reluctance is the reason for poor prospecting skills; and the ineptitude of marketing is why the sales force is not meeting its sales numbers.

While these solutions work at times, just as often they will not be successful because the problems may have different root causes.

A more effective way to fix the sales problem is to understand the company or team's sales process and the activities that underlie it. To truly understand a company's sales problem, it is critical to view the situation quantitatively which involves having measurements. Herein lies the problem: Many sales organizations do not have any measurements except for the basics or more seriously, they do not know the sales metrics that drive their sales results.

Sales metrics are all about measuring the important components in the sales process: hiring, lead generation, prospecting, qualifying and interactions that lead to closing the transaction. It is not enough to rely on gross measurements, such as gross revenue per sales person or turnover numbers. Those numbers are not specific enough to give leaders the insight into what is going on in their sales group. It is better to measure sales activities and their results at various stages of the selling process.