Sales Productivity versus Efficiency — Enforcing Sales Discipline

Challenge: Sales reps want to sell more and updating their SFA systems is frequently not a top priority.

Lord Kelvin said: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Nowhere is this truer than in enforcing SFA utilization. It is easy for reps to complain about this as useless overhead. However, I would argue that they cannot effectively do their job without religious follow up to records in their systems.

An organization needs to set minimal expectations on the frequency and depth of updates. Clearly, lead development reps must update last call attempt, number of call attempts, last call outcome, scheduling next activity, key account details, and so on, or they cannot guarantee the right follow up with these prospects. Similarly, sales reps need to update opportunity records to accurately forecast their sales this month and beyond.

Furthermore, sales and marketing management personnel need these details to actively manage the business. Identifying average sales cycles, win/loss reporting, and more all require relatively deep updates by the reps to SFA systems. In this new Sales 2.0 world, updates to SFA are a job requirement – both for the rep and for management. You cannot run a business without accurate and up to date in information in SFA systems.

Lesson: The argument ‘I don’t have time to update all this in SFA’ rings hollow.

Author: Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies

For the last 20 years, I have led demand generation teams supporting high growth technology companies. Now working as an independent consultant, my responsibility is to apply best practices in the creation of these programs. My goal is to enable marketing teams to become self sufficient with a data driven culture of KPI's, test and measurement in service of achieving company revenue targets. My approach is to work with senior management identifying objectives and wildly important goals. With these in mind, we work together to build programs, processes and systems that will reach these goals along with the measurement KPI's to evaluate progress. Along the way we will enable the team to manage and maintain these systems so achieving these goals becomes a natural cadence of the marketing organization. View all posts by Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies