Steve Diamond over at Oracle delivers a whiteboard (thanks BNET) that speaks to the dollar impacts of some fairly straightforward Sales 2.0 initiatives—CRM for 360° opportunity management, a meritocratic email campaigning environment, pricing analytics, and (my personal favorite) on-demand presentations. All in search of an 8% overall productivity increase.
[Update: This video has been made private, perhaps owing to Mr. Diamond’s move from Oracle to Salesforce.com.]
His math centers on an assumed field sales force of 200. But I see applicability on a much smaller scale.
Let’s run the numbers for a team a fraction of that 200-strong number… say 20 bag-carrying reps. With all else remaining equal, slipping through the efficiency cracks is a still-healthy $1,560,000.
The spending on modest innovation in process and technology—and the loaded headcount to own it—won’t approach that million-and-a-half number, regardless of the platform you’re building from. (At twenty reps, we’re squarely in the SMB space. So we’re not talking about ripping and replacing any existing tools pulling their weight. Just a nip and tuck using the in-house, the cheap, or the free.) The new infrastructure pays for itself the first year. The field sees it’s 8% improvement. Everybody wins.
Missing from the presentation above—cut for time, surely—are the additional qualitative benefits that begin to accrue through proactive approaches to the knowledge management and document automation initiatives Steve hints at. Here’s a couple:
- Identification of content production gaps across a matrixed collateral “family”.
- Consistency of selling materials throughout the sales cycle. (The value statement from the approach letter reappears in the RFP. The infographic in the RFP informs a critical slide in the presentation. The customer pains bulleted in the presentation are addressed in the final proposal.)
- Effective messaging, assets, and document models are quickly replicated and reused systematically.
- True collaboration among salespeople grows organically around the conversations, presentations, and documentation that really worked.
If you want to see your 8%, an investment in the right people (!!) and strategy will get you there.