Are we helping our sales people enough?

Every article you read on the latest trends in sales tells us selling is getting much harder. We have heard it all before. Buyers are more informed, there is an increased number of decision makers on the buying process and an increased number of sellers involved in the sales process. Other research points to sellers now providing too much information to the buyers to differentiate themselves from the competition. So yes, we all agree it is getting harder to sell, but do we ever to stop to think..."how could we make things easier for our sales people?" "How could we help them to actually provide greater value to our customers by actually giving them time back to spend with them"? 

Let me ask you another set of questions. How often do you hear these comments from your sales team?
1. I spent hours last night searching our content management system for that white paper on ROI? 
2. The CRM takes me hours to update each day. Can we please have a sales admin resource to support us?
3. Our pricing calculator is useless. It takes me hours to put a quotation together.
4. I'm in yet another internal meeting...I have no time sell?
5. I've got training again this week!
6. It takes so long to get a contract from legal.

Do these sound familiar? Do you hear these from the majority of your team. These are all bottlenecks in your sales process preventing your team from being more successful. They make up the tedium of selling. These tasks prevent us being efficient and spending more time with our customers delivering value.

The sad thing is many of these mundane tasks can be improved with the aid of simple digital technology. Yes, there are several advanced Learning Management Systems, Content Management Systems and the latest Enablement platforms but how many of them are a square peg in a round hole? We will certainly be exploring some of these systems in future blogs but for this first post I really want to keep things simple stupid. KISS. 
Let's KISS tedium goodbye by taking some time to review the tedium tasks your sales people face today. Take these 5 steps.
1. Take our Tedium Calculator test
2. Rank the tasks in terms of time eating into their daily routine.
3. Calculate the potential cost in time for completing that routine task.
4. Multiply that time by the number of sales people you have.
5. Now you have a business case. Review the process and do something about it!
KISS

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