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PRESS RELEASES |
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Only 12% of field salespeople demonstrated best practice skills in
live sales transactions with clients, according to research from
Silent Edge, the UK sales performance authority, and Cranfield
School of Management. The findings were based on the benchmarking of 600 UK field salespeople across a range of industry sectors. Silent Edge and Cranfield used 28 ‘key sales attributes’ to assess the salespeople and to establish their strengths and weaknesses. The sales people could be divided into five types – Developer, Product Specialist, Market Specialist, Customer Specialist and Master Salesperson. Developers are the most numerous in sales companies but scored the lowest in the research. Areas such as company background, use of relevant case studies, negotiation and objection handling were highlighted as being of a ‘Large Weakness’ but the group as a whole scored significantly poorly with just four out of the 28 competencies being rated as ‘strengths’. The Master Salespeople, by contrast, are of generally high competence and can be easily differentiated from the other groups due to their lack of weaknesses, rather than the high levels of strength. Russell Ward, Sales Director at Silent Edge, said: “The fact that just 12% of the salespeople we benchmarked fall into the category of Master Salesperson is worrying. In effect, it means that 88% of salespeople in the UK are failing to make the most of a live sales situation. “Yes, there are some mitigating circumstances. For instance, 34% of those we benchmarked can be defined as ‘Customer Managers’, which implies that they are more focused on building the client relationship than hard selling, hence the indication that they could be account managers not salespeople. However, it is still very apparent from the research that the sales team is the first line of attack and too many times they are falling short. “Until UK plc starts to take sales seriously as a profession and review the way that salespeople are trained and developed, it seems unlikely that this situation will improve.” The research suggests that, to improve the salespeople’s skills, the Developers, Product Specialists and Market Specialists need to work as a part of a larger sales team to broaden their skills and make better use of their talents. Lynette Ryals, Professor of Strategic Sales and Account Management, commented: “Many field sales people demonstrated a lack of preparation for the sales meeting and a failure to listen in the meeting. Sales people need to raise their awareness of these and other key sales techniques if they are going to improve their performance.” |