What is a High-Performance Sales Organization? A high-performance sales organization outperforms its competition and meets and exceeds the requirements and needs of its customers.
Change Management Programs for High-Performance Sales Organizations should involve regular assessments of sales strategies, sales processes, and sales resources to serve the customers effectively.
Increasing the salesforce effectiveness during a customer interaction
is one of the major tasks in B2B sales management.
Effective selling requires the salespeople to have a precise understanding of what constitutes working smarter during their interactions with customers. The practice of adaptive selling enables salespeople to exploit the unique advantage of personal selling in the B2B sales environment.
Academic studies on sales performance variance explained by salesperson attributes examined the effect of role, skills, motivation, personal factors, aptitude, and organizational factors on sales performance and introduced the concepts of salespeople’s knowledge structures.
Because sales managers seek to understand how to enhance sales performance, they should know which salesperson characteristics explain the largest proportion of sales variance.
Academic research has found that aptitude (salespeople’s mental abilities, personality) accounted for 2 percent in sales variance, selling skills (e.g., sales presentations) for 7.2 percent, personal characteristics (physical traits, background, and experience) for 3 percent, motivation for less than 4 percent, and role for 9 percent of sales variance.
Role | ????????? 9.0%
Selling Skills | ??????7.2%
Motivation | ????4.0%
Personal Characteristics | ???3.0%
Aptitude | ??2.0%
Knowledge structures refer to salespeople’s knowledge of their customers and the way in which the customer and selling knowledge is organized. Research indicates that in a sales environment, salespeople classify customers into self-developed categories and use a common strategy for each customer group. Salespeople’s knowledge includes information about the actions encountered in sales situations that they can use to adapt their sales behavior when selling to specific customer categories. If salespeople have more detailed knowledge of customers, it is expected that they will be better able to perform.
Some of the ways sales managers can help salespeople to constructively analyze their successes and failures are:
- Ask probing “why” questions about selling situations.
- Challenge external excuses; focus on controllable factors.
- Encourage strategy analysis for different customer types.
- Implement regular assessments of strategies, processes, and resources.
- Develop training programs focused on building knowledge structures.
- Teach early customer categorization and strategy selection.
- Encourage continuous learning from daily selling experiences.
By focusing on these areas, you’ll cultivate a sales force that doesn’t just meet targets – it shatters them.
Managerial Recommendations:
In this article, I have made some suggestions for improving selling effectiveness through increasing the adaptability of salespeople and their knowledge structures. Successful selling requires detailed knowledge about different types of sales situations and customers. In addition, salespeople need a repertoire of selling strategies and knowledge about which strategy is best suited for each sales situation.
Salespersons’ knowledge structures explain a large proportion of their performance and should be examined by organizations. Salespeople should be trained to develop better knowledge structures. These training programs should help salespeople to develop richer knowledge structures by combining information from everyday selling experiences. The future of B2B sales belongs to those who can adapt, learn, and apply knowledge strategically. It’s time to turn your salesforce into a powerhouse of performance.
For more information please contact:
Inna Hüessmanns, MBA
International Growth Solutions
E-Mail: ih@i-g-solutions.de