Productivity Analysis

Maximising the time of your commercial organisation.

Tolstoy famously wrote, “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

The five primary growth sources for business are Markets, Buyers, Offerings, Acquisition and Productivity.

An organization's productivity encompasses the effectiveness and the efficiency of its functions, roles, processes, projects, programs, tactics, technologies, and nearly all leaders are under constant pressure to maximize their organization's productivity to drive revenue and profitability.

For a sales organisation, successful time management and high productivity are paramount for success. While sales leaders can create better sales reps, great managers, and customer relationships, the one thing they cannot deliver is more time in the week for sales activities.

There are so many facets to measuring the productivity of your commercial organisation and this can be very dependent upon the maturity of your sales operations, enablement, and intelligence structure, but either way it is a critical exercise for companies big or small.

A CEO or CRO should be sponsors of productivity initiatives, and the one of the CRO’s strongest assets is their sales operations and sales enablement functions. Increased yield for sales reps will result when operations and enablement are well aligned and the CRO finds the right balance between these two functions’ efforts to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Sales activity studies are a great way to reveal barriers to sales productivity in the field and in the supporting organization. The subsequent analysis can help organizations plot sales activities and understand where efficiencies can be gained.

This type of study is a best practice method for sales organizations to determine if sales reps are spending the right amount of time on productive activities. If the outcomes are negative an activity study can also identify obstacles that are impeding reps’ productivity.

These studies can be conducted using a variety of techniques including surveys, interviews, self-reporting, and field observation. It is critical that a company uses a combination of two or more of these options to compare and verify findings.

By utilising the results of the studies, you can define activities into four quadrants of either core or non-core selling and direct or internal engagement with buyers and/or customers.

The four quadrants and the productivity goals for each are as follows:

Core internal activities: those that a rep conducts away from a buyer or customer to qualify, prepare for, or progress a sales cycle, such as lead identification, proposal creation, account planning, onboarding, finding content etc.

Core external activities: when a sales rep engages directly with buyers and customers, including face-to-face meetings, telephone conversations and email exchanges.

Non-core internal activities: these must be minimized or eliminated, e.g., internal emails and meetings that are unproductive.

Non-core external activities: this is time spent with buyers without an active sales cycle present, such as customer service calls or relationship meetings.

Once productivity initiatives are executed their success should be tied to KPIs and incentives, and the CRO also must work hand in hand with leadership of other functions and must ensure that sales management consistently institutes and governs necessary changes across the organization.

Has your business conducted a recent sales productivity analysis? Engage with us to help you.