Short of a smash-hit new product, it’s hard to find improvements of that magnitude in other activities. At a 47% win rate, annual revenue is $352 million an increase to 57% means revenue is $427 million and the top-performers’ win rate of 72% means $540 million. Imagine a company with 200 sellers, each pursuing 25 opportunities annually (about 2 per month) with an average sale of $150,000. Sellers who reported to top-performing sales managers averaged a 72% win rate versus an overall average of 47%. To get a sense of the impact of differential performance, consider win rates. With these criteria, 18.7% of respondents qualified as top performers and the rest were 81.3% of the sample. Pricing is a moment of truth in business development, and in this research, sales managers are not considered top performers when their teams discount their way to win rates. ![]() Their teams maintained premium pricing.In most firms, the selling cycle is the single biggest driver of cash out and cash in. This is a key marker of a cost-effective sales force. Their teams achieved a win rate of more than 50% on proposed sales to prospects.Conversely, in most businesses, production, service, and other assets get deployed in response to successful business development efforts - the organizational reality behind the old truism that “nothing happens until you make a sale.” This is important because so many other resource-allocation decisions in companies depend upon sales forecasts and the ability of the team to meet forecasts. At least 75% of the sellers on their teams met annual sales goals.To identify top performers, we focused on criteria where sales managers have much influence: Sales managers must do this while learning about their people, judging diverse strengths and weaknesses, interacting with others in the organization, performing new administrative tasks, and hitting their numbers. You move from being selected-typically for performance as an individual contributor - to being the new person at the low rung of the managerial hierarchy, who must learn the ropes. Moving from “doer” to manager is difficult in any function. It pays to have good sales managers, but this begs some important questions: What does it mean to be a top-performing manager, and what do these managers do? Defining Top Performance The result is even more striking for sellers with less than five years of experience: With an effective manager, they were 240% more likely to be top performers compared to new sellers who did not. ![]() In a global study of more than 1,000 sales managers and sellers in industries ranging from medical devices and professional services to technology and pharmaceuticals, we found that top-performing sellers are 83% more likely to rate their managers as effective in helping them achieve their performance. These managers have an outsized impact on performance, and the people who report to them recognize that.
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