Selling is getting harder and harder. There is a new challenge that sales leaders are now being forced to face, and it isn?t what you would first think.
Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO of Selling Power magazine, recently hosted a very informative sales conference in Boston called Sales2.0, The Art And Science Of Accelerating Sales. During his opening address, Gerhard reiterated a statement he?s made in similar Sales2.0 conferences where he predicts a decline in sales professional headcount from around 18m to eventually around 4m in 2020.
It?s a pretty steep decline in the number of sales people out there and I?m not sure I personally agree that we?ll see such a drop off. However, Gartner has suggested that Gerhard is on the right track by predicting that ?by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.?
If the decline is true, sales leaders have a significant challenge in the years ahead, and it?s not what people may think. The key challenge isn?t how to do more with less. This challenge has been constant not only in sales, but in marketing and customer service since the dawn of the Internet. Sales2.0 has introduced sales reps to new tools and services that let them identify with ease not only a list of companies that can be targeted, but also what those companies are doing on social media, what business events have happened, where a potential contact went to school and even where he went on vacation via LinkedIn or Facebook. And marketing automation capabilities such as lead scoring and nurturing have vastly improved lead workflow so that sales people can identify just when the right time is to get in touch with a prospect.
Doing more with less is old hat for any reasonably successful sales manager. The key challenge for sales leaders over the next decade will be to identify ways to eliminate the 90/10 rule in sales productivity, where 90 percent of the sales people are at or below goals and 10 percent are the big closers. In my next post, I will explain how a sales leader can beat this challenge and clone the productivity of their top closers.
Source: http://www.business2community.com/sales-management/todays-top-challenge-for-sales-leaders-0275753
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