This is the third and final blog in my current series about proper Territory Design.

Much of the first two blogs were about discovering, understanding, and finding ways to maximize the market potential for your sales organization.

Why is my sales organization not evolving faster?

I continue to see sales organizations attempt to specialize by selling activity and fail to hire true hunters.  Furthermore, the environment they create isn’t conducive to retaining top performing new business reps.  If your sales force structure has been designed based on an effectiveness strategy (growing revenue and maintaining cost), specializing by selling activity is a great way to drive revenue.  In this article we will explore why mistakes are made when deploying new business reps and how you can begin to solve the issue. The result will be an uptick in new logo productivity.

Sales Force Sizing is defined as the science of matching selling capacity to market demand.  In my last blog post, I laid out our six-step methodology for determining optimal headcount and aligning sales force size with market potential.  In this post, I want to specifically address market potential. 

Setting quotas is difficult for organizations because so much at stake from a financial perspective for both sales representatives and the company. The way to perform proper Quota Setting is by following our Methodology shared in our webinar that you can download today here.

87% of sales management tell me they want to spend more time with their ‘A’ players   Yet, Sales Manager selling time is hovering around 48%.  SMs don’t have the time to spend with their ‘A’ reps (or any reps like they should).   In comparison, World Class selling time is around 77% for SMs.  And part of this time must be spent with those ‘A’ players.

SBI has developed a model that utilizes your findings from the Win/Loss Analysis and Assessment Phase so as to allow you drive up your win rate percentage, and to improve your overall sales strategy.

Too often, Channel Managers find themselves in a familiar situation—the boss wants a high increase in Channel Revenue for the fiscal year, and the numbers aren’t looking too good.  Even worse: direct sales is knocking the cover off the ball, eliminating any notion that this is a product based issue.

The Q1 Win/Loss season just ended and our sales consulting firm performed 409 post deal reviews.  The #1 reason deals were lost in Q1 2012 was an inaccurate understanding as to who really makes the decision on a deal.  By our estimate, 84 lost deals could have been won, if only the sales team had a better understanding of the influence dynamics inside their accounts.  We are in the era of committee decision making.

According to a study conducted by McKinsey & Company, nearly 75% of new sales process implementations are not adopted by the sales force. This is because human beings instinctively react negatively to change. Changing the sales process touches every aspect of the life of the sales rep, so resistance is a natural and expected part of the implementation process. Without proactive measures, your implementation will most likely fall among the 75% group of failures. Here’s what we have seen to be most effective.