By Colin Longren, Vice President & General Manager of The Millau Group (www.millaugroupglobal.com)
After reviewing the TMSA 2016 Metric Study, I want to highlight three critical areas of the Sales Metrics Section that executives and sales leaders should be concerned with if they’re in the Transportation, Logistics, and Supply Chain Industry:
- 64% of the organizations surveyed achieved 75% or less of their initial annual quota (underperformed by at least 25%) for 2015. The average tenure of a Vice President of Sales is reported to be 18-34 months depending on the source. If we are constantly failing to reach our goals, this is a process problem, not a people problem. If you took an important, forecasted sales opportunity and asked each salesperson in your organization to respond with the next best step to move it forward, how many answers would you get?
It’s difficult to scale with that much variation in execution.
- The sample reported that 48% of their net new sales were contributed by the outside sales team (vs. inside sales or other channels). Some organizations require salespeople to be responsible for net new business and taking care of current customers. If a salesperson’s workweek is 50 hours and 15% of that is actual selling time (moving a sales opportunity forward/towards close), are they spending time being strategic or just being busy? Being strategic and knowing what to do next on each sales opportunity…would shift numbers dramatically (again, it’s a process problem).
- Only 6% of the sample’s sales budgets are being allocated towards training or Learning & Development. What is it about this industry that scares its leaders from investing in their sales team to achieve growth? I’ve seen organizations that plan to grow through “more.” More salespeople, more quotes, more trucks, more everything. More does not correlate with more sales…investing in people and process does.
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