By Peter Gilbert the managing director of HR Chally SA, a sales recruitment and training company identifying talented young salespeople, places them, trains and coaches them with guaranteed results. (www.chally.com)

As sales evolves from a tactical to a strategic issue, we must view sales differently from the way it has been managed for the past forty years. This dramatic shift means it’s time to make changes in both our sales approach and the design of our sales forces. If your company is well established, it most likely needs a new way of thinking. Customers have changed. Competition has intensified. Your own economics, strategies, and goals have changed. Is it any surprise that sales must change?

One of the reasons few companies excel in sales, is the lack of sales leadership. Most B-2-B sales organizations are more focused on the sales numbers than on the capabilities of their sales forces. One reason for this lack of focus is that most CEO’s have little or no sales experience. Consequently, they tend to think of sales as what Jeff Thull, CEO of Prime Resources Group, calls a “black box.”

“The black box view of sales is an attitude that we frequently find among senior executives who do not have sales experience. To them, the workings of the sales department are largely a mystery. They can set goals and send them into the black box of the sales force, and they can tell whether the goals have been reached – after the fact. But they can’t effectively manage what happens between the two points.”

Also there are issues competing for the attention of senior executives, especially the fulfillment of their corporate mission statements and strategies. Many leaders are pursuing promises to create total solutions for customers or providing the highest quality product or the most competitive price. But mission statements that declare “We will have the most professional sales force in our industry” are far less common.

Sales effectiveness is typically not seen as a competitive advantage worthy of executive attention. Rather, sales is usually defined as a subset of marketing. When sales results meet or exceed their targets, the credit tends to go to the current strategic focus: “Our drive for greater productivity allowed us to price more aggressively”. When the results fall short, however, sales is blamed.

There is ample evidence that running a top class sales organization is a great competitive advantage. For example, Sales and Marketing Management’sannual sales rankings are based on peer and customer ratings of companies from a variety of industries on seven key performance criteria: recruiting top sales talent, ability to keep top salespeople, quality of training, opening new accounts, retaining accounts, product knowledge, and reputation among customers. Researchers from Harvard Business School compared sales growth against SM&M rankings. The results are unequivocal—sales effectiveness pays handsomely.

And the most influential factor in making the sale is the caliber of your salespeople. This is well researched. Business customers themselves have placed salespeople in the top spot. Since 1998, statistical analysis of purchasing decisions has demonstrated that the sales professional is the most important factor in determining what customers purchase, how much they pay, and how long they continue to buy. In fact, analysis has proved that salesperson effectiveness accounts for 39 percent of customers’ buying decisions.

This development in sales represents the emergence of a new competitive advantage in the B-2-B sales. Sales professionals have become the dominant influence on their customers’ buying decisions. Consequently the effectiveness of sales professionals becomes an added value to their customers and a competitive advantage for employers.

In the business world, the salesperson is the sale. Companies must realign their sales strategies to more effectively manage their sales approach and more proactively determine the design of their sales force and the level of talent in their sales team.

Part 2: Translating Customer Wants Into Sales Excellence