What I’ve taken from the 5th edition of Salesforce State of Sales

The Salesforce State of Sales 5th edition gathers insights from more than 7,700 sales professionals across 38 countries on driving productivity in today’s economy. Adam Gilberd , Executive VP Sales, said, “we now live in an era of tight budgets and higher operating margins. The challenge isn’t about finding growth, but about maximising efficiency.”

The Key report finding:

1. New sales mantra: maximising impact.
2. Reps strive to meet rising buyer expectations.
3. Sales operations boost efficiency.
4. The seller experience gets a second look.

New sales mantra: maximising impact.

?The report says companies are adapting fast with a new focus on productivity and efficiency. I suspect this focus on productivity and efficiency is with the additional heavy lifting of more sales tech in the sales process. 67% of sales professionals say selling is harder now, and the pressure is on to keep hitting sales targets. This tells me that these organisations are internally focused – no wonder selling is more challenging; in my view, they are focused on the wrong target.

?70% of sales leaders say their sales organisation is taking fewer risks, turning to improve alignment between departments and removing business-slowing silos, improving data accuracy and quality. This is good to see; however, I wonder to what extent the customer and buyer are involved in the efficiency-creating process. Too often, companies drive for internal efficiency that has little or no long-term impact on the customer, end user or business profitability.

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Reps strive to meet rising buyer expectations.

?The Salesforce State of the connected customer May 2022 states:

·???????57% of buyers prefer to engage with companies through digital channels

·???????87% of business buyers expect sales reps to act as a trusted advisor

Companies focus on steady, predictable growth, state the report; hence, customer satisfaction is now front and centre.

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The Scale Your Sales Framework focus is retention and expansion, so we are happy to see this as a key performance success indicator of the top 5 ways reps maintain relationships after a sale:

1. Value-based communication
2. Active listening
3. Follow-through/accountability
4. Seeking feedback on the selling experience
5. Troubleshooting/customer service.

Sales operations boost efficiency.

?8 of 10 sales professionals say sales operations play a critical role in growing the business, with sales ops moving from focusing on tools and processes to driving efficiency and cost savings with their inclusion in strategic business conversations.

?For any business, efficiency must be a priority; however, with the growing importance of sales operations, I suspect they have little or no interaction with the customer, and end-user and efficiency measures are internally focused.

I continually share my guiding principle with my enterprising CEOs, CROs and Sales Leaders driving revenue growth and efficiency. “If you do not know the impact of your decision on your most valued customer, you should not be making the decision”.

The seller experience gets a second look.?

Retention is a concern as a 25% turnover is expected in sales organisations over the next 12 months. How do you make sales professionals feel and believe they are set up for success, even with a limited headcount and stretched resources?

The report details the reason why sales professionals want to leave their jobs. Sales reps complain of lousy company culture, and sales leaders complain of unrealistic sales targets and insufficient flexibility and autonomy. The successful retention strategies are improved sales training and enablement, team building opportunities and streamlining the sales process.

?Whether in a sales culture or not, we know that improving employee experience directly impacts customer experience, satisfaction, and retention. This is the lever companies have a handle on but clearly, not pulling. According to the Experience Advantage report by Tiffani Bova , B2B companies see an uplift of 1.8 times in customer KPIs when they focus on employee experience.

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The Salesforce report states that coaching is one-way sales organisations can keep sales professionals engaged and productive. With only 53% of sales leaders using coaching solutions, there is a lot of room for improvement.

Mary Shea, PhD Shea, VP, Global Innovation Evangelist at Outreach , has proposed a model for the new cohort of transformational leaders, managers, and reps. The new Revenue Innovator Manager is a change agent, as sales managers now have to be champions of their teams’ career development and mental fitness, and become data and digital savvy, to become data-led coaches.

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In future articles, I will discuss keeping sellers happy despite the limited headcount pressure on recruitment and salesforce efficiency and productivity investments.

I have talked for a long time about the focus on quotas in a customer-centric sales organisation being the wrong goal. However, we will leave this for another article. In the Salesforce State of Sales report, hitting quota remains a challenge, with only 28% expecting to make quota, and 10% of sales professionals expect to make 50% or less of their quota in 2023?

The good news is that the sales organisation has had to reskill or die during the pandemic, and 75% of sales professionals, up from 63% in 2020, are confident in their sales organisations’ ability to reskill.

Please read the full report for insights - link in comments.

I look forward to your comments.

For more insights, check out Scale Your Sales.

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