In its most recent study of the international workforce, Proudfoot Consulting, one of the world's leading providers of management consultancy services, revealed that at a global level, executives ranked expansion into new markets as most important to ensuring profitable growth in the next two years; yet, only U.S. respondents recognized the fastest and easiest route to improved short term revenue as selling more to existing customers. And, since U.S. companies are already the world's intensive users of technology, U.S. executives rank better use of technology as the second most important route to short-term profitable growth.
Other findings of the global study include:
- More than half of executives (55%) said their sales teams were average, or worse, at converting customer dialogue into sales
- One fifth (22%) have set no target for sales force efficiency improvement in 2006
- On average, salespeople spent just 11% of their time actively selling to customers
- Salespeople think they spend twice as much time actively selling to customers than they actually spend
- Administration and problem solving together take up 49% of a salesperson's typical day
"For a company to flourish, it has always had to be adept at selling," said Don Hammalian, Head of Sales Effectiveness Practice for Proudfoot Consulting. "Yet, what we are seeing is that thousands of salespeople monitored by us over the last three years are spending most of their time on administration and problem solving, not selling."
Whether a salesperson is born or made is a long standing debate among executives and these executives historically are split about the answer. However, according to the 2006 Proudfoot study, more executives than ever are shifting their viewpoint "" 63% of those polled for this global report now believe that a good salesperson is made. This may explain why, at a global level, 60% of executives identified training as their top priority to improving sales force performance, ahead of better marketing or increases in administration support, technology investment, incentives and team size.
This study of corporate sales force performance is the first in a series of three supplementary chapters to Proudfoot Consulting's principal publication on company-level productivity performance "" the 2006 Proudfoot Productivity Report. This study aims to provide answers to questions about productivity issues by drawing on the findings of two elements of new work undertaken in the first quarter of 2006. The first is an independent analysis of three years of proprietary data collected from sales operations by Proudfoot Consulting during internal reviews of operational performance of companies around the world. The second element comprises extracts from an executive opinion survey commissioned by Proudfoot Consulting from The Conference Board. The survey was completed by more than 800 people, mostly Conference Board members, plus other senior executives in large, private sector corporations.
The complete "2006 Proudfoot Productivity Report" is available online at www.productivitystudy.com.
About Proudfoot
Proudfoot Consulting is part of Management Consulting Group Plc and for more than sixty years has specialized in implementing change to achieve measurable and sustainable operational performance improvement in client companies. Sales performance improvement is an area of special expertise. For additional information about Proudfoot visit www.proudfootconsulting.com.