“I don’t have time for another one of these!  I’ve got to be in-front of my customer!”

Have you heard that from your sales force lately?  Maybe someone’s even said it today.  The “these” referenced above are the multiple internal tugs at a sales force’s time…things such as meetings, surveys, reviews and trainings that internal partners hold.

Why are these things so problematic? Because time spent fulfilling internal company requests is time NOT spent selling.

So how do you ensure that the sales force has time to achieve its primary objective of selling while still meeting the demand of valuable internal requests?

We profiled an organization that tackled this challenge head on…Schneider Electric (one of the world’s largest manufacturers of equipment for electrical distribution and industrial control and automation) came up with a pretty straight-forward solution: they put a communications screening process in place.  Read More »

When The Home Depot decided to audit the number of messages received by the average store manager in a 30-day period from multiple functions across the firm, here’s what they found:

Time Required for Managers to Process Company Communications

Company messages received:               3,000 per month per manager
Average time to process:                      1 minute per message
Total time required to process:              3,000 minutes per month per manager

That’s about one week per month in responding to internal messages!

Home Depot’s managers are not alone. We all are constantly bombarded with messages at work from internal stakeholders. The problem is more acute in Sales though, where reps struggle to keep up with the barrage of e-mails, voicemails, and now social media while in the field. In the absence of an established communications policy, reps use their own discretion to determine message urgency and importance, resulting in them either spending time away from value-creating activities or ignoring business-critical messages.

In our discussions with member companies, we’ve uncovered four key tactics to reduce the volume of communications to the sales force, while still ensuring the flow of critical information: Read More »

Do reps in your organization complain about having too many initiatives and too little time? When reps feel bombarded with requests from all directions, they often struggle to prioritize (or even distinguish between) them.

As the old adage says: if everything is important, nothing is important.

Responding to the myriad requests from all parts of the organization can take away large amounts of selling time, leading to reduced productivity and sales. A constantly shifting set of initiatives also confuses and demotivates reps.

In order to tackle this problem, Kodak created a rep initiative screening process by which it screens and prioritizes all inbound requests of sales force time through a rigorous set of filters:

• Filter #1 – Alignment with corporate priorities: Evaluates how well-aligned a request is with corporate strategy and to what degree Sales can contribute to its execution.
• Filter #2 - Alignment with sales priorities: Reviews all requests in the context of its channel strategy, financial returns, and sales capacity.

Screening requests with these filters helps Kodak settle on one manageable set of initiatives and  send one unambiguous message to the sales force around what they should be doing.

SEC Members, find out more about Kodak’s Rep Initiative Screen and how the process helps keep reps engaged and effective at their jobs.

There are probably no individuals more time oppressed in your sales force than your sales managers.  And a perennial focus for sales organizations is making sure that managers have enough time to spend on high-value activities.

A big problem standing in the way is admin. In fact, our sister research organization, the Communications Executive Council, profiled how The Home Depot sized up the problem.  They created a dummy manager inbox on their email system and let it run for one month.  Guess how many emails were waiting there, unopened?

3,000! And if you estimate that it takes about a minute to read each of those emails, they cost 50 hours of on-the-job time – and that’s not even factoring in the time to type a response!

So are your managers buried by too many administrative requests? Read More »

Note: This post was written by Matt Dixon, Simon Frewer, & Andrew Kent for the Harvard Business Review. Sales Challenger readers first read about this research in Andrew’s post, Spend Less Time Selling, published on January 11, 2011.

Download the full report of these findings »

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This just in: salespeople are spending less time actually selling to customers, and more time on internal activities, than they were just five years ago.  But before you pine for the “good old days” when reps spent more time in the customer’s office than in yours, what if we told you that having your reps spend less time face-to-face with your customers might actually be a good thing?

At SEC Solutions, we’ve been tracking how reps spend their time since 2003. Our B2B Sales Index contains data on the sales process activities and time signatures of more than 10,000 sales reps across all major geographic markets and industries.  Recently, we took a look at how the time signature of sales reps has changed over the past five years.

When we compare rep time spend today with what it looked like five years ago, it’s clear that the sales world has undergone a dramatic shift.  Time spent on pre-sales and post-sales activities are both up by 15%.  Meanwhile, time spent on non-sales (i.e., admin) work is up a whopping 21%.  And all of this has come at the expense of actual selling time in front of the customer, which is down a full 26%.

Read the rest of this post on HBR »

By Andrew Kent

It’s official: salespeople are spending less time selling to customers, and more time on internal activities, than they were five years ago.  That’s trend #8 from our “Ten Trends Every Sales Exec Must Know in 2011.”  But what if I told you that less customer-facing selling time is a good thing?

You’d probably think I was crazy.  I’ve never met an exec who told me, “My priority this year is to get my reps spending less time with customers.” For most of us, the priority is the exact opposite; indeed one exec told me he wants salespeople to “live” with their customers.

But before we ask our customers for the keys to their apartments, it’s important to understand what type of face time we’re losing and why we’re losing it.  SEC Solutions has been tracking rep time spend since 2003, and the evidence points not to the usual suspect of administrative time-sinks (although they’re a part), but to a fundamental change in what “selling time” means.

More specifically, star sales reps are spending less time presenting and persuading, and more time planning and orchestrating stakeholders.

The chart below shows how rep time-spend has changed over the last seven years, based on SEC Solutions’ analysis:

Read More »

Whenever I speak with companies that sell through the indirect channel, one of the questions I’m most often asked is about the channel manager role. Because it’s undoubtedly become one of the more complex roles in a sales organization, Council members are always curious to discuss the job description, key competencies, and main activities of the individual who manages your channel partner relationships.

And though there’s not one magic, all-encompassing channel manager job profile I’m able share, a member in the High Tech industry recently summed up the role with this quote, which I thought was right on point:

“Channel managers are the inflection point. You can have the best channel partner program in the world, but at the end of the day, your channel managers are where the rubber meets the road.”

In fact, channel managers’ ever-expanding responsibility set requires them to act like “mini-General Managers.” They have to navigate their own organization, the channel partner’s organization, and at times the end-customer’s organization. And within each of these groups, the channel manager must interact with multiple stakeholders from sales support, marketing, finance, procurement…the list goes on.

Given the importance (and complexity) of the role, here are some of the trends that have begun to emerge about the indirect channel manager:  Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Every traveler encounters the occasional setback—like getting caught in the rain without an umbrella, being unable to find a good spot to grab dinner, or having to book a hotel room last-minute. Your smartphone can help. We’ve compiled a list of top-rated travel apps from the (literally) thousands that exist:

• Don’t get stuck in a bad seat again. Flight Guru covers the basics of air travel; it tracks flights in real-time worldwide. For those who value a decent seat on the plane, this app also links to Seat Guru, which helps you find your ideal seat by comparing seat width, legroom, recline and location. (PRICE- $.99, PHONES- iPhone)
• Hungry? Urbanspoon uses GPS to find nearby restaurants, which you can filter by neighborhood, cuisine, or price. Fun factor: Designed to look like a slot machine, the app is activated by shaking the phone. (PRICE- Free, PHONES- iPhone, Android)
• For fans of TV food programs. TV Diner finds restaurants near you that have been featured on shows such as “Man v. Food,” “Throwdown with Bobby Flay,” among others. (PRICE- $3.99, PHONES- iPhone)  Read More »

(This is a guest post by Vanessa North of the Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communications professionals.)

I just got back from a glorious ten days in Croatia and now that I’m back, I am noticing more than ever the constant bombardment of information, emails, & instant messages that distract me from doing any true thinking. 

Matt Richtel has coined the term the “three-day effect” when you are away from all technology and distraction.  After three days you start to relax, sleep better, and lose that nervous twitch of checking your blackberry every 3 seconds.  This is probably why the average weekend just doesn’t feel long enough; you get close to relaxing and then get pulled back to reality with a thump.

The New York Times reports that the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times per hour.  Think of what that means in terms of how much information that you are subjecting yourself to on a daily basis.  It’s no wonder we hear, “I haven’t had time to think” so often.  

It is only when you actually stop reading and taking in new information that you can sit back and really think what it all means, and actually process it.  By constantly rushing from one idea to the next without giving ourselves the time to think, we aren’t giving ourselves time to know what we really think.  I’m probably not the only one who sits there and has revelations when I’m on holiday.  You realize opinions you never knew you had.  You make life-changing decisions (or at least come up with the ideas for them).  In short, you think.

So as companies are striving to add more channels to reach their employees from all angles– are we actually doing more harm than good?   Read More »