Top Sales Outfit Secrets

Here’s a steer from a recent Selling Power article. The writer contends that the following five traits identify a world class selling operation. How do you fare on these?

Buyer Enablement – your focus is client goals rather than sales cycle gateways
Outbound Lead Ratios – your leads are in the main not brought in by the reps in the field but by support efforts
Pipeline Ratios – a touch ambiguous perhaps, but you should apparently have way more in the funnel than your target
crm/sfa Utilisation – they find that winners “boast a 70 percent higher utilization of these systems than average organizations”
Sales Rep Training – and here they provide an incredible 160% more than their also-ran brethren

I feel certain they’ve left out a couple of other equally significant biggies though. Clearly the presence, adherence to and matching of a repeatable sales process cannot be under-estimated. Likewise the cultural impact that living a shared vision creates is a must in every team that is going somewhere special. This may be because their list as presented seems to show more a tactical rather than strategic bent. Still, it’s a pretty good starting point for analysis.