Want better sales performance? It’s about time.

As any sales manager or CFO can attest, improving sales performance is a tough, time-consuming, task. The problem isn’t technology. It isn’t sales skills. It isn’t information. It’s a problem of ‘how do people behave’.

Behaviors, at the best of times, are hard to change. Most would say the behavior of sales people is impossible to change. Perhaps, then, it’s no surprise that, in the tech sector, increased investments in sales and marketing have been accompanied in every year for the past nine years by declining margins. This is an expensive problem that can’t persist.

In my view, the only way sales performance can improve is by changing how sales people spend their time. Sales people are exceptionally results-oriented. If we want to change how they spend their time, we have to help them see the value in spending their time differently. Give them a radar system that guides them to call the right people at the right time on the right issues and it stands to reason that they will go on to produce better sales results. When sales people gain new ways to invest their efforts where effort’s most likely to have impact, they will learn to have more impact. When able to see that what they’re doing isn’t working, sales people will stop doing over and over again things which don’t work. They’ll gain the curiousity needed to try new tactics and the courage to abandon bad tactics.

They’ll discover the ‘hard fun’ of learning, at work and go on to make wise use of their time. It’s about time.

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Sincere thanks to colleagues whose ideas and feedback shaped this short trailer, including: Vanessa Fox, Don Perkins, RAG Media, John Holland, Tibor Shanto, Sharon Drew Morgan, Carl Moe, Andy Rudin, Nigel Edelshain, Howard Hodges, and Sharon Little.