Profitability Through Positive Productivity
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According to a CMO Council study, “Closing the Gap: Understanding the Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative,” some 46 percent of sales and marketing executives felt that in order to maximize sales across the organization, the level of action on opportunities needed to be boosted, and the speed to action needed to be accelerated. This mandate is especially critical when you consider that according to a recent report, 74 percent of buyers chose the company that was first to add value. Speed and efficiency are of the essence as customer expectations for value and relevance soar.
Despite this clear call to work smarter and faster, sales productivity improvements have been slow to materialize. According to CSO Insights, only 33 percent of a sales representative’s time is spent actively selling. Not only is sales struggling to push away the inefficiencies to build those critical relationships, but it can also be hard to actually get sales teams up and running. According to Accenture, 42.5 percent of sales reps take 10 months or longer to become productive enough to contribute to company goals. Through all of these signs of challenge and struggle, a clear and loud mandate continues to emerge: business leaders must find new strategies to boost sales productivity and empower the front line to effectively monetize relationships quickly and efficiently, from engagement to transaction and beyond. In a report in Forbes Insights, 71 percent of C-level executives didn’t just believe that boosting productivity was an important mandate; they called it critical to achieving growth. So where and how can businesses empower the front line while sparking profitability through accelerated sales productivity? Are there new calls to action that sales leaders can respond to in an effort to streamline inefficient processes, eliminate waste and remove friction from sales engagement? How are smart organizations growing at scale while remaining compliant and error-free in their engagements with customers and prospects? These are just some of the issues that the CMO Council, in partnership with Oracle, will explore in a one-hour, interactive webcast focused on productivity, profitability and opportunities to foster revenue. Joining the discussion will be experts and market leaders in sales and operational effectiveness to share where and how they are maximizing profitability while empowering sales teams and resources to work in a more nimble, agile and lucrative environment. To shed light on best practices in this area, you will hear from Greg Swender, Senior Director of Sales Automation and CPQ at Oracle, and Frank Cespedes, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School. |
