Implications for Sales Productivity of Aberdeen's 2009 Sales Automation Report

Aberdeen's 2009 Sales Automation Report reveals conditions with important implications for firms looking to gain a sales productivity advantage via uses of technology. Their survey of over 200 firms reveals that:

• being a Best-in-Class firm using sales automation tools is lucrative; such firms are the equivalent of sales superstars. More of their sales force achieves quota. Their lead conversion rates are higher. They're achieving higher year over year revenue growth.
• having technology, by itself, is no silver Best-in-Class bullet. Firms getting the highest ROIs are integrating sales automation systems, improving data quality, aligning systems to fit their sales processes and activities, and (through combinations of the above plus the odd carrot) achieving exception user adoption.
• best-in-class firms are constantly learning and improving; they're continuously honing their sales automation systems based on user feedback.

There's still plenty of room for improvement:

• only 10% of firms using sales automation tools are extremely satisfied with the relationship between their tools and sales performance.
• uncertainty in sales performance persists. Even with flawless sales execution, sales people are still left with nothing more than hunches as a basis for gauging their prospects' levels of interest.
• such uncertainy makes it difficult to identify 'at risk' prospects and ensure corrective actions occur. Firms able to do so are rare. Even in best-in-class firms, only 26% are detecting and pro-actively serving their 'at risk' prospects.
• user adoption of sales automation tools comes at a cost - in best-in-class firms, sales reps are spending up to 3 hours a day inputting data or sales activity into their sales automation system.

My take on the implications for improving B2B sales productivity:

• user adoption will be automatically assured (without carrots or guns) when sales people can see clearly the impacts on their own performance of using sales automation tools.
• users will be impatient to see impacts. They won't be willing to wait weeks or months. They're results oriented and pressured to produce results. Just like their bosses. It's a good thing.
• real-time data showing the connections between effort and sales impacts conquer these user adoption issues. Users can see the future sales impacts of their invested sales efforts. They can see and fix mistakes quickly. They can develop the craftsmanship of top sales performers.

Improving B2B Sales Productivity Requires A Better Balance Between Data and Attention

Peter Nicholson, President of the Council of Canadian Academies, notes how profoundly we've become information rich: the costs/unit of capturing, storing, and transmitting data have declined 10 million fold since the early 1960's. "It's as if a house that cost half a million dollars in 1964 could be bought today for a nickel."

He goes on to note that as we've become information rich, we've become attention poor. It's triggered a knock-on effect - an erosion of the deep, integrative, learning that can only come from 10,000 hours of focused effort. What's required, in his view, is a more balanced tradeoff between the depth of what we know and the speed with which we can retrieve it. This, in turn, will require creating new ways of interacting with information and colleagues that create a 'peripheral intellectual vision' with which deep insights can accrue.

In my view, his observations carry important implications for improving sales productivity. We're seeing some of the most profound advances in B2B sales productivity coming from sales people who are attacking the scarcity of their prospects' attention with deep insights. They're creating significant value for their prospects by creating a vision of the possible. Doing so gains their prospects' attention. As Reps do it over and over again, their deep insights become habitual. Their methods for producing insights are learned through feedback, creative habits, and hours of practice; craftsmanship emerges.