A prepared sales rep is a successful sales rep, but in a recent study from Hebert Research, 62 percent of respondents report spending less than 20 minutes preparing for a sales call. The study contains input from about 150 sales managers and vice presidents of sales, and its goal was to get a snapshot of the average organization’s field salesforce population to determine exactly how much time people are taking to prepare for sales calls.
Knowledge Anywhere commissioned the study, and the company’s president, Charlie Gillette, said that the results weren’t shocking, but there were a few surprises. For instance, nearly 50 percent of study respondents report using the Internet as their primary source of information. In the journalism world, that’s a big no-no, but apparently sales professionals have judged the Internet to be more timely and more accurate than newspapers. Using the Internet is certainly a viable method for business research, provided the sales rep’s online search targets reputable, business or market-centric sites such as The Wall Street Journal Online, the Web compliment to the print edition of The Wall Street Journal. But, that 62 percent number indicates that Web research or no, reps simply aren’t preparing as much as they should. “Buyers are looking for their sales reps to be prepared, to understand their business and their industries,” Gillette said. “And sales managers are looking for their sales teams to spend at least 30 minutes preparing for a sales call. Come to find out, neither one of those things are happening. Sales reps are spending at best 20 minutes and some less than five minutes to prepare. These are people doing enterprise kinds of sales, not walking into your Best Buy and having that sales rep be prepared for a buyer or some sort of transactional consumer sale. These are professional sales reps locking into a company to sell them some type of business element. The relatively big ticket items that range from $25- to $100,000 original purchase price, really big purchase decisions that people are making where the sales cycle is long, ranging anywhere from a month to a year.”
Given the situation and what’s at stake, it’s natural to want a sales call to go as well as possible, Gillette said. Further, a sales rep’s habit of not preparing or not preparing thoroughly can impact their long term success. Using the Internet to gather company and industry information is a relatively new research method, one that has not been completely accepted. “Professional sales reps have been preparing the same way for decades,” Gillette said. “Within a relatively short period of time, folks have turned to the Internet, Google being the top of that list as the most accurate, most timely place to find out information about your customer, the industry and so on. This is something new, and as part of the sales process it has not been institutionalized that a sales rep needs to be prepared with these elements before he or she goes and makes any sales call to a company. Think about it. Less than 10 years ago, depending on the level of sophistication of the company, IBM or Xerox might have a database at their fingertips to be able to do thorough research on a company. But for most organizations the idea of researching a company would mean a sales rep had to literally go down to the library and look at archives.”
Gillette suggested that learning leaders’ skill and ability to provide the right tools and access to information may prevent some sales reps from making unprepared sales calls, but the learning organization should not attempt to act as the sole repository for knowledge or information. Instead of employing traditional methods to try and boost sales performance, the focus should be to provide accessible, easy to use tools and systems in a kind of do-it-yourself model. “A learning organization would attempt to set up a knowledge base, beef up the intranet, or make sure the right kind of information is in the CRM. I think all of those initiatives look good on paper, but what a learning organization needs to do is teach sales reps how to systematically fish for the knowledge and information. Rather than creating internally the infrastructure to gather all this, train them on the systematic way to go and fish for that information themselves. Here’s the checklist to find out if we’ve ever sold to this company. Make sure you go to the CRM system, talk to a colleague. It’s the only way to keep it update, current and believable for the sales rep.
“I think that learning leaders challenge is the sales side of most organizations runs at a pace that’s faster than traditional organizations operate in,” Gillette said. “The sales and marketing departments start building shadow training organizations because they’re not being serviced and fulfilled by the corporations. The training and learning organization needs to find a way to move extremely fast to outpace the requirements of a sales team and have realistic expectations because a sales manager is not going to come with a requirements documents and a suggested curriculum. They just don’t think in that way. All they know is our sales reps don’t understand our products and services, and we have to do something. I think the biggest takeaway is probably recognizing that a prepared sales rep is an effective sales rep, and providing the tools and systems to get them prepared will make for happier buyers, happier sales managers and at the end of the day will help shorten the sales cycle.”
