Top Needs for B2B Sales Reps in 2013 Survey Results

Transcription

1 Top Needs for B2B Sales Reps in 2013 Survey Results Company Rollout:

2 Top Needs for B2B Sales Reps in 2013 Survey Results With strategic planning for 2013 in full force, we surveyed over 300 business-to-business sales reps to learn more about their top challenges and improvement opportunities to help them hit their number in Survey Demographics 54% of the responder s primary focus is farming existing accounts The responder s top industries included: Financial Services 21.8% Professional Services 11.9% Consumer Products -13.3% Health Care 10.2% The responder s top sales role 80% - field sales rep The responder s tenure in their current position Greater than 7 years 47.5% The responder s company size Greater than $500 million 80% 2

3 Top Needs for B2B Sales Reps in 2013 Survey Results After crunching the numbers, here s what they told us are their highest priority needs: Improve my lead quality to help me improve my pipeline. Help me improve my prospecting and consultative selling skills. Give me better competitive insights to help me close more. Provide me with a better sales process, support resources, and mobile technology to improve my productivity. We have outlined additional detail in the following pages of this report. As you prioritize your sales improvement investments for 2013, we encourage you to think both top-down, to align investment with strategy, and bottomup to ensure you are considering the needs of your frontline reps. 3

4 Top Pipeline Priority: Improve Lead Quality 4

5 Top Closing Priorities: Competitive Insight and Selling Skills 5

6 Top Productivity Priorities: Sales Process, Support Resources and Mobile Technology 6

7 Top Skill Priorities: Prospecting and Consultative Selling 7

8 What else would help you hit your number in 2013? Complete Product Knowledge, Six Sigma Project, Time Management Skills, Conflict Management Skills Most importantly, we need unique products to be more competitive in the marketplace. We also need to make improvements to some of our existing product line. Competitive information and access to industry surveillance. Pricing software that is simple and fast. A equal way of distributing account assignments. Some reps are assigned too many large accounts and most others are not assigned enough. The process needs to be more fair at creating an equal opportunity for all. Research that is relevant, un-biased, with quantitative P-values and numbers. ipad for presentations. The iphone is not a productive resource in the field. RFP automation, commissions management, and territory planning. As a sales manager, I would like some better tools to manage my direct report s sales skills and hold them accountable in ways other than what comes across as micromanaging. I want to find a more succinct way to address how our product helps customers. Improve or recreate a new stack-ranking mechanism. There is an extreme disconnect between what we do and how we are evaluated. Bringing in volumes of money is not in reflected as success. I think that the training that we have gone through has been great, but we do not have supporting materials/documentation to help us stay committed to the sales process. I also do not think we have a very well outlined Relationship Management Operating System. Quality competitive pricing tools is top. One-on-one per competitive brand with continuous updating. More executive visibility to our customers. If we are selling technology (B2B, CCAP), we should be using tablets (ipad). Proposals for the products and solutions we sell. The current proposal toll is a joke. If our senior management was asked to develop one quality proposal using this tool they would clearly understand the challenges faced by every AE and why our proposals are not the quality our customer s expect. 8

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