Finding, maintaining, and nurturing the right commercial team is essential to acquiring customers, generating revenue, and maximizing profitability.
And therein lie three of the biggest challenges sales organizations are facing today: having the right capability, sustaining the right capacity, and maintaining the right level of commitment. Let’s look at some of the reasons why.
First up: capability. Sales organizations have been telling SBI that just finding the right people (and ensuring they’re in the right roles) is a daunting enough task. The issue? They haven’t found an effective way of attracting the best people or closing on the ‘A’ players.
There could be a few reasons for this. Lack of competitive compensation. A lack of competitive differentiation. Inability to ramp up the team quickly.
But even if the right team is in place, there still can be capability challenges. Quotas that can’t be met, for example. Struggles in finding effective ways to sell new products. Lack of sales enablement tools to perform successfully.
The second challenge is capacity. Insufficient time spent in front of customers (especially high-value prospects). High customer acquisition costs. Misaligned segmentation of customer channels, so that too much time is spent selling to the wrong prospects.
There could also be a misalignment of talent. For example, top performers are not getting enough leads, or are not placed in the best territories. There may be too many non-selling roles in the organization. Or the sales reps are spending too much time on activities not related to sales at all.
Third, there’s the organization’s level of commitment – either establishing it or maintaining it. Is there a retention strategy or program in place for top performers? How engaged is the sales team? What are the reasons for the high attrition rate of ‘A’ and ‘B’ players? Are the best players being nurtured sufficiently? What about the up-and-coming sales leaders – have they been identified? Has a clear growth path been charted for each member of the team?
Even the best-run and most successful sales organizations are experiencing at least some of these talent challenges. And it’s no surprise, given the many uncertainties we’re now facing in 2023.
This is exactly why SBI developed our Talent Assessment tool, which enables leaders to pinpoint the skills your sales team needs to optimize productivity. Using a combination of data-driven analysis, the tool provides a complete view of your sales organization individually and collectively, giving you a clear path forward to achieve better business results. You can learn more about the Talent Assessment tool here.
