Raising Productivity on the Front Line!

A couple of statistics caught my eye this week. According to the Salesforce global ‘State of Sales’ survey (5th Edition), sales reps spend only 28% of their week actually selling! From personal experience, I’ve seen how many front-line individuals get distracted by internal stuff, service-related queries, billing issues etc.…and sometimes gravitate to activities they enjoy as opposed to need doing!

In parallel and compounding this issue, I discovered that 85% of B2B leaders say they’re struggling to get a budget for headcount.

Does this situation resonate with you?

I always feel that our team is our most important (and usually the most expensive) asset. So it’s crucial that we create a highly motivated, customer-focused set of individuals who maximise their invaluable time aligned to customers. We also want our people proactively engaged in revenue-generating activities rather than being swamped in unproductive admin tasks that could be better dealt with through other methods.

A critical task of the CRO role is to optimize the organisation – creating a fit-for-purpose, growth-orientated operating model that ensures cross-silo collaboration.

Looking at the latest results from my CRO Revenue Growth Scorecard, this appears to be an area of concern for many CROs:

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So, given the challenge of squeezing more from our teams with a declining budget, how do we optimize our organization? Simplifying this into some brilliant basics, I offer you three critical success factors:

1. Understand Current Skills and Resources:

Against the backdrop of our stated vision and objectives, it’s key that we objectively assess both the competencies and levels of motivation of our people. We need to judge competencies against the specific requirements within the sales, marketing and customer success professions, both at an individual and manager level. Only by taking this scientific view can we get an honest understanding of our skills and build plans to fill the gaps.

2. Organize to Win:

Outputs from sales and marketing teams are highly transparent, so we need to ensure we quantify the return on investment (ROI) associated with building a customer-facing organisation. Equally, we need to plan how and where we invest our valuable resources (both direct and indirect) so that we can engineer our operating model. A new era of customer engagement is upon us – we need to inject agility (e.g. hybrid sales roles) and leverage both physical and digital channels in line with our customer segmentation model.

3. Accelerate Performance:

We want our people proactively engaged (98%, not 28%!) in revenue-generating activities rather than unproductive admin. Audit the tasks that front-line teams are performing and immediately remove the crap!  Make sure teams are fully motivated with inspiring incentives, clear performance management plans and continual learning. It’s all about creating the buzz through customer-centric leadership (see previous Newsletters)!

In summary, think about your operating model as an organisational return on investment. This means measuring those objective metrics such as revenue per head, MQLs, etc. But it also means treating your people like customers – ensuring your reduce people churn and maximise employee engagement.

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