Business Intelligence Provider Gets Smarter on Sales Productivity
Situation: A large provider of business intelligence services in the global financial information services industry doubled the size of its sales force by acquiring a competitor. The merger of the sales forces resulted in multiple systems around pricing, order entry, contracts and billing. One year later, the sales force was believed to be allocating a large percentage of time to lower value administrative activities at the expense of high value selling time. The company needed to increase sales productivity to meet aggressive growth objectives without significant increases in sales resources.
Challenge: Leadership intuitively knew that the internal processes of the two companies were negatively impacting the sales organization, but they did not know the magnitude of the impact. The company wanted to know if they could meet their growth objectives by enabling the sales force to work smarter by offloading administrative tasks and focusing on selling time.
Solution: Alexander Group assessed sales time activity and discovered that time spent on low value tasks was much higher than leadership anticipated. Roughly 50% of seller’s time was spent on administrative tasks such as billing issues, order management, pricing, contracting and other post-sale processes. Only 30% of their available time was devoted to high value selling. By offloading these important administrative tasks to the sales support team, a lower cost resource, we returned a large amount of direct selling time to the sales force.
Benefits: Average sales time was increased to 45% of available time, placing this client among best practice firms across all industries. More importantly, resulting productivity gains put the client on the path to achieve 10% growth objectives without increasing sales cost.
