Adherence to Sales Process Drops, With Negative Results

More interesting insights from CSO Insights' Sales Performance Optimization 2009 Survey:

I was surprised by the fact that 62% of all companies surveyed have a random or informal sales process! The CSO Insights Report points out that, in fact, year over year, companies using formal or dynamic processes have decreased, and that loss was converted to increases in informal processes.

Why does all this matter? Well, businesses that have implemented more formal or dynamic sales processes have:

• higher conversion rates throughout the sales cycle,
• better predictive ability to forecast, and
• better ability to adapt quickly to changes in the marketplace (e.g., recessions)

Clearly, it takes much more discipline and rigor to implement and maintain formal sales processes than not (I know because I watch my friends in Sales here at Glance do the hard, sometimes tedious, work of maintaining our formal process!) But it's worth it. In difficult times, sticking to formal sales processes can give you a significant competitive edge.

A few resources on sales processes, to get you started:

• The New Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by the Worlds Best Companies, Miller & Heiman.
• Systematic Selling: Process Map Portfolio, Smith, Selden, and Burton
• BNET.com's 84 Resources for Sales Processes

And of course, my own plug: Make every conversation count, throughout your sales process -- Try Glance, the only screen-sharing tool built for sales pros, free for 7 days...

-- Carla Gates, Director, Marketing