I had an “aha!” moment a week or so ago reading through a thread on LinkedIn with a prompt: “Salespeople are getting worse.”

Why are only 53% of Account Execs (Reps) making quota? This stat comes from a CSO Insights report from Miller Heiman.

Reading through the extensive list of comments on the thread one finds many, many, MANY thoughts on what the problem might be.

• Lack of understanding about the Customer’s:
  • business fundamentals
  • buying strategy
  • needs and desired outcomes
  • service and support expectations
  • need for tailored solutions
  • emotional or intuitive buying responses
• Company
  • unrealistic quotas, not based on benchmarks or historical data
  • Rising quotas
  • unhealthy growth expectations
  • goals not based in reality
  • goals inconsistent or not communicated
  • Weak vision
  • Scattered products
  • No GTM strategy
  • Poor culture
• Hiring / Retention
  • no methodology
  • no pre-assessment or vetting of candidates
  • Over-hiring
  • More reps fighting for same attention
  • Career development
• Sales Training
  • how to sell at the company- sales process
  • Reps don’t want to adapt or learn
  • Should cover planning, thoughtfulness, positioning, analysis of decision-making, competition
  • Should include coaching and continuous learning
  • Fundamentals for reps and leaders
  • Ability to pivot on changes in industry
  • Different models for sales supply chains
  • Sales AND management training for managers
  • Manager coaching training, both sales and management
• Product Training
  • time, support and tools to understand product
  • Effectiveness of product training
• Market and Environment
  • Product offering meets actual need in the market
  • Changes to demographics, technology, buyer behavior and expectations
  • Digital disruption
  • Empowered and informed buyers
• Sales Management
  • VPs coaching DOSs coaching AEs
  • Not open-minded to feedback or willing to change strategy
  • Don’t know how to sell
  • Obsessed with meaningless metrics
  • “Blowtorch” management
• Sales Reps
  • don’t want to work, marketing has made them lazy
  • Scared of the phone
  • Ability to challenge the buyer’s thinking
  • Don’t do proper follow up
  • Too focused on social selling
• Process
  • Lots of gurus selling theory
  • Picking the RIGHT process
  • Funnel / pipeline problems
  • Cycles have changed
  • Need a holistic analysis of the process
  • Need to automate the 64% of non-selling time
• Product
  • doesn’t work, not viable
  • pricing is wrong
• Sales Ops
  • use data and data science to reassess strategy and improve
  • Sales Ops identify trends not seen by Reps
  • Stop seeing Sales Ops as overhead
  • Doesn’t even exist in many orgs

That’s from ONE POST!

My question and “aha!” moment: who is analyzing all this to get to the 20% of these causing 80% of the gap? Which are Root Causes and which are Symptoms? Is anybody even doing correlation analysis (the first step) to see which of these might be root causes? I suspect there is a lot of guessing and tossing darts going on.

In a future post I’ll talk about some of the geeky details of how we answer these questions.