Are You Ready to Improve?

Executive Summary: Within your own sales organization, find out which practices and tactics bring the best results. Then consolidate the wisdom and help all salespeople on your team practice better methods, adopt more effective action steps and measure themselves against higher standards.

Fortune 500 giants Ford, Xerox, Motorola and DuPont have shown that benchmarking techniques can improve manufacturing, order processing and marketing efficiency. Can the same techniques work successfully when applied to sales activities? Yes, says Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based Best Practices Benchmarking & Consulting Inc. CEO Chris Bogan. He claims that a targeted benchmarking effort can improve virtually any sales organization’s productivity between 10 and 50 percent.

So what is benchmarking? In a nutshell, benchmarking is a method for determining how effectively your company performs specific functions when compared with different internal divisions or against other companies. Companies or units that excel at individual functions receive the moniker “best practice.” That standard then becomes the model other companies seek to meet or surpass.

Benchmarking comparisons can span industries that may seem to have little in common. More than 10 years ago Xerox sent several senior managers to Freeport, Maine, to study L.L. Bean’s efficient order processing function. Since then the successful mail order house has become universally recognized for the “best practice” in order processing. By 1992 Bean was receiving up to five requests a week to host similar benchmarking missions from other companies.

Although few companies have utilized the power of benchmarking in any organized manner specifically for sales, Bogan says that to some extent virtually all salespeople benchmark their efforts against competitors.

“At the individual level,” he says, “most salespeople are not really aware of how their peers at other companies sell. But if you ask them whether they would like to know what the best salespeople in their industry are doing and what the secrets of top performers are, they will give you an unqualified ‘yes.’ At the same time, on an informal level, salespeople in most industries employ basic performance benchmarking by making comparisons with competitors’ products, pricing and features. The next step is to study the practices of the sales activity or the sales process more specifically.”

Step One: Understand The Voodoo That You Do So Well

While discovering industry-wide best practices can be worthwhile, it may require an exhaustive and costly search. There is, according to Bogan, a less expensive and more practical approach. By determining internal best practices among individual sales units, divisions or salespeople, you can often produce unexpectedly profitable results. But, he cautions, before improving sales functions you must first understand in detail the steps that lead to sales in your organization.

“The first step in a benchmarking or best practices venture requires that you break down the sales process into subprocesses or smaller steps and then analyze what it takes to be successful at each step,” Bogan explains. “I recommend that a manager or executive VP act as facilitator. Once you deconstruct the different steps in the sales process you can get a much greater sense of the specific activities that drive success in these individual areas.”

Step Two: Find The Best Practitioners

In many large sales organizations, the numbers often reveal that different units excel at different processes. While one sales team may have the lowest turnover rate in the company, which points to a best practice in hiring, another may generate leads most effectively. The same is true among the salespeople on one team. Bogan recommends that companies first determine which units or salespeople are achieving company best practices at the different processes.

“Once you identify what a group of ‘best practitioners’ is doing at each stage of the sales process,” he says, “you can consolidate that wisdom into a kind of encyclopedia or composite of practices that are bigger and more powerful than what any one individual has ever personally developed.”

To illustrate the point Bogan relates the story of a nationwide mortgage banking company that found that the most productive loan officer in the company worked not as they suspected in California or New York but in a small city in Utah.

“This one person had been very creative in his marketing and the creation of a brand presence for himself in an industry that consumers generally know little about,” Bogan says. “He created a very focused marketing approach that included buying a year’s lease on a billboard at one of the most central locations in town for people he had identified as his target market. This was just one of the things he was doing, but company executives found that many of his successful approaches to marketing and resource allocation could be translated directly into other markets throughout the company. Before pursuing benchmarking they never would have thought to look into what was making him so successful.”

Step Three: Choose Your Weapon

Rather than attempting to overhaul an entire organizational sales process wholesale, Bogan recommends that companies choose a specific aspect or process to revamp.

“First identify a high-yield, high-benefit area that management feels can, when improved, produce a marked difference in overall performance,” he explains. “Next develop a set of honest process maps that plot out the activity and show what will make other salespeople successful by adopting them. And then develop performance measures that identify relative levels of achievement.”

Certain activities have conspicuous performance measures, such as retention of salespeople for hiring or closing ratios, while others are more difficult to measure. For these difficult-to-quantify processes, look for secondary performance indicators.

“If, for example, you wanted to benchmark your company’s needs assessment,” Bogan says, “one indicator might be how frequently a salesperson moves to the second round stage or is closing sales. If someone has a high closing level or is getting to that second meeting, then that probably means they’re doing something right.”

Step Four: Theory Into Practice

Once you’ve discovered the specific steps best practitioners follow to achieve success at the individual process you choose to benchmark, codify those steps so that the rest of your salespeople can copy or adapt those behaviors. According to Bogan, often the major difference between top and average performers that benchmarking exposes lies in the average performers’ inability to follow through on every essential step toward closing sales.

“Although they may not be able to articulate what they do,” Bogan explains, “best practitioners tend to follow an unconscious checklist of behaviors that increase their chances for success. Many less successful salespeople, when they sit down and analyze what they do, discover that they often forget important steps and leave them out entirely.

“Even when they know intellectually what they are supposed to do, there is still a gap between what they know they should do and what they actually do on a sales call. Once you point out to these salespeople both what the exact essential steps are and how to track themselves to make sure that the best practice is being followed, productivity goes up enormously. Now admittedly this is not rocket science, but it is the kind of rigor that produces success.”

Another Approach: Leaving The Fold

While the benefits of internal benchmarking are innumerable, Bogan agrees that to find authentic “best practices” companies can look to successful sales organizations in almost any industry, at times the less related the better. As an example he describes the results an accounting firm might achieve by adapting a best practice from mail order giant Dell Computers.

When a Dell telephone representative takes an order that surpasses a certain price threshold, an automated help screen appears on the computer to remind the salesperson to offer the customer a service agreement. Through experience Dell has found that above a certain price customers become much more receptive to that type of offer because of the size of their investment. By reminding their people on-line to mention these offers to customers, Dell has seen a significant jump in the sale of these add-on features.

It turns out that this concept has a lot of leverage in a professional service organization. When exposed to Dell’s example of an automated reminder, service companies can adapt this idea to develop an internal checklist that reminds people of all the things they should do when selling certain kinds of complex services. “When I show people what Dell does and how that could work in other environments,” Bogan elaborates, “it’s as if you can see the lights going on, and they say, ‘My gosh. That’s exactly what we should be doing.’ And it’s all just a matter of exposing them to the power of best practices across industries.” n

For more information write Chris Bogan,

Best Practices Benchmarking & Consulting Inc., 424 Lakeshore Ln., Chapel Hill, NC 27514-1733

or call 919/403-0251.