PRESS RELEASES
 



UK sales teams weakest skill is selling, says new research

-- Great soft skills and presentation but when it comes to selling, UK salespeople habitually underperform --

Silent Edge, the UK sales performance authority, today releases new research – based on benchmarking 1000 UK salespeople over a two-year period - which demonstrates that, despite having a host of useful qualities, UK salespeople are underperforming when it comes to actually selling.

Silent Edge has been objectively and statistically evaluating the sales capability of sales forces across the UK for the past four years.  The company’s most recent set of data, taken from the period Spring 2004-Spring 2006, provides clear evidence that selling is the area where most UK salespeople are weakest.

UK salespeople look good, have great personalities, are capable of establishing a rapport with prospects and have good knowledge of the products and services they are offering.  UK salespeople scored above 80% on all of these qualities in the Silent Edge study:

• Personal presentation                              96%

• Rapport with prospect                             94% 

• Company offerings                                   83%

• Product/Service knowledge                     86%

However, salespeople are very weak - scoring less than 50% - at those skills which actually

• Closing skills                                             46%

• Differentiation from the competition          31%

• Objection-handling capability                    30%

•  Negotiation skills                                      16%

•  Articulating the Value Proposition            15%

Russell Ward, CEO of Silent Edge, said: “These results should prove staggering to anyone not used to working with sales teams across the UK.  Sure, most salespeople scrub up well, they’re jocular, and they can establish a rapport with the prospect.   And they know their onions – everyone we benchmarked was credible when it came to company background, understanding their products and the market in general.

“But – and it’s a pretty big but! – they’re not as good as they could be at selling!  Only 1 in 5 deals ever gets closed in the UK today, so vast tracts of the average blue-chip firm’s sales and marketing resource is being wasted.  In most of the cases we’ve seen, it’s actually more the fault of the training process than incompetence.  We seem to labour under the delusion that great salespeople are born not made, and as a result, most sales training takes the ‘throw mud against the wall and hope some of it sticks’ format. It is often not relevant to the individual, does not take into account individual competency level or motivate them to want to change their behaviour.

“UK salespeople also struggle when it comes to resolving problems and negotiating.  They tend to be strong when singing off their own hymn sheet or creating solutions off the cuff – i.e. as long as they retain the initiative, they’re fine.  But once the client puts the sales person on the back foot, performance (and results) inevitably suffer.”

“Finally, the other major issue in a sales performance is the management of the sales force. Most sales managers are “best sales person turned manager”.  Problem is, the qualities you need to be a successful sales manager are often the antithesis of those that make a successful sales person. Evaluating the sales management capability of a team is vital to long-term success.”