Survey On Increasing Sales Performance

CSO Insights, research firm specializing in sales effectiveness, has recently published a report entitled, “Optimizing Lead Generation – What’s The Payback?”, in which authors Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer report on companies’ responses to an interesting question. The question is…

“During the coming year what, if any, sales effectiveness initiatives will your company be undertaking to improve sales performance?”

• The winning first priority is “Optimizing lead generation programs.”
• The winning second priority is the same.
• The winning third priority is “Revise our sales process”.

After optimizing lead generation…

• 9.3% of salespeople achieved quota (increase from 56.8% to 66.1%)
• 16.5% lead to real opportunity increase (32.2% to 48.7%)
• 7.0% in win rates (48.6% to 55.6%)
• 7.0% in reduction in no-decisions (20.9% to 14.7%)
• 10% reduction for new salespeople to reach full productivity

You can download the whole white paper from Eloqua's website.

Think about this lead generation stuff because it’s powerful.

What surprises me is that no one considers price increase as an option. A mere 1% price increase could mean as much as 12% increase in net profit, but no one seems to care. While companies are busy increasing sales volume, they gracefully ignore ways of increasing margins. Hm.