Sales Effectiveness - Methodologies

Methodologies

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a methodology used to evaluate the sales effectiveness of an organization. A comprehensive survey of 6,800 frontline sales people was conducted in the past which identified that a well defined organizational sales process is the key driver for sales performance.

The benchmark study also identified 5 distinctive groups of people existing in every organization:

• True believers - Has great adherence towards the sales process and believes its enabling powers
• Compliants - Follows the sales process but do not believe it as enabling
• Mavericks - Recognizes that a well defined sales process exists, but choose to follow their own processes
• Self Reliants - Does not know that a defined sales process exists and needs to work it out themselves
• Clueless - The remaining group who confesses that they do not know of any sales process and do not believe it as enabling.

Examples

• Sales Force Automation and Customer Relationship Management solutions such as Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM on Demand
• Sales Knowledge Management solutions such as Qvidian (formerly Kadient) and StreetSmarts
• Sales Intelligence solutions such as Dealmaker, Generate and iLantern
• Sales process consulting companies such as The TAS Group, Accenture and Capgemini
• Sales Content and Proposal Management solutions as CallidusCloud and Tinderbox

Note

No sales force effectiveness methodologies have been independently audited by the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB) according to MMAP (Marketing Metric Audit Protocol).