Good Article .

We have really think on the area of 77-89% their time .

Thanks

I like your concept of “perspective.” I think too many people, both on the buying and selling side have incorrect perspectives of each other and how to work together effectively in helping solve problems of mutual interest.

Professional selling is about sales person aligning themselve with the customer, helping to facilitate their buying process, and creating value through the process. My sense is this probably aligns with the concept of social selling. (By the way, my purpose in this article was not to talk about that, I’ve written extensively about it in other articles, but your point is more important than the article).

I think that as buyers and sellers start to approach the process as more of a collaborative problem solving process we will see some radical changes in the way we work with each other, and profound improvements in effectiveness–on both sides.

Sales needs to change their approach and behaviors. The foundation processes and models have been in place actually since the mid 60′s, but the consistent execution of these has been sorely lacking. We see many things today that are creating forcing functions to drive behavioral changes in this process. Social media and social selling are at the forefront of some of these forcing functions.

Thanks for the comment, it’s great to reconnect. Separately, it would be great to discuss privately–then in a forum “innovation in selling,” (which is way beyond the Sales 2.0 tools). Together, I think we can come up with some interesting concepts.

Sales effectiveness is all good but it needs a PERSPECTIVE. If the perspective is “leave a message”, “can’t reach”, “No interest”, “talk to…”, or “Great you call, here is the problem with the product I have…”, “I’ll get back to you…”.

If having “MORE TIME WITH CUSTOMERS” means more down turner for sales people, then Christian Maurer’s point comes to play, people keep them selves rather busy with “things” then with customers – who aren’t really customers.

Now in our December meeting we introduced a whole new “social selling” process. A process that matches the changing behavior of the buyers. And viola – sales people are now actually trying to seek more time to spend with customers by themselves.

In other words PERSPECTIVE (the perspective we give sales people) is a key element in sales effectiveness. Too many people just lost touch what selling means today – which is radically different than just 5 or 10 years ago.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/Axels
(my social map)

Until sales people see the power of using these as personal productivity tools, they won’t utilize them and they won’t understand how they can really help improve what you do. Unfortuantely, I don’t think many of the vendors or management does a great job focusing on this. This leaves sales people to figure out what works for them and leveraging that—in many cases it is pencil and paper.

I happen to be a fan of Salesforce, but it’s not much different functionally than many of the other tools. In implementing it in our company, we’ve focused on how to use it for our own personal productivity (and there are still a lot of paper and pencil things we do as well). None of could imagine living without a tool like this—and, by the way, as the manager I get some great reports–but that wasn’t the driver.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I hope you keep visiting and commenting, it makes the whole thing more valuable! Regards, Dave

One element that is usually overlooked is how few usable productivity features CRM systems offer to the salesperson. They are usually just large contact management and forecasting systems, and do little to help a salesperson run a sales campaign – or even plan their day.

I’m not sure if you include Salesforce.com in the “2.0″ category, but it is a classic example. It’s “Activities” function is nearly unusable by an active salesperson.

What I need is a list of my 10-15 sales situations with the last two and next few action items listed, so I know at a glance where I am with each one. I’ve yet to find a system that could give me a simple “dashboard” like this without a convoluted process to input each item. Most systems make you fill out a complete mini-form for each activity – which is WAY more work than I’m willing to do – and much more effort than the pad of paper I keep (and re-write once a week) that gives me a single view of my entire territory.

I’ve tried PC-based outliners, but since they don’t link to the CRM system I end up doing a bunch of copy/pasting that again is more work than it’s worth. So I stick with paper.

I can’t believe that 30-odd years after the advent of CRM systems, it’s still more efficient to plan and track my activities on a piece of paper…

The fact is that there are ” time wasters” as you term them within every organisation like the few you mentioned . Some of them are easier to address like maybe meeting timimgs and reporting systems .

However there a few others which are not quite so easy to address , speaking from my experience there are areas like information requests , clarifications , and sometime customer support related issues which to my mind cannot be termed as ‘time wasters’ as they indirectly and directly contribute to the the customers image of the company , the responsibility for building which lies mostly on the customer primary contact with the company i.e th Sales person .

To reduce the impact of these so called ” time wasters’ these one needs a strong backend support system which will work in tune with the priorities set by the sales people and not by their workload and who is making more noise . This requires a commitment in terms of support pre-sales and after-sales which many companies only pay lip service to especially in these recesionary times .

Perhaps the way to get 5 more sales calls a day is to free up the time they are spending on customer service.

Great insight!

http://www.emcien.com/emcienmatch

Would love your feedback on this.