Measure your Sales Support Effectiveness

Jesse Hopps

Providing marketing support to sales professionals is an equally challenging and rewarding task. Improve the value of your delivery by conducting a Sales Support Effectiveness Survey.

What is Sales Support?

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - systems that provide a 360° view of customer-related account information.
  • Demand Generation - supplying adequate demand for your company's products or services through direct, online, channel, & other campaigns.
  • Lead Management - includes supplying leads, qualifying & scoring, de-duplication, integration with CRM systems, and allocation & distribution.
  • Product & Company Training - comprehensive education of products and their position in the market, differentiation, and competitive advantages.
  • Marketing Collateral - any documents that are used to communicate to your prospects and customers. Includes brochures, data sheets, etc.
  • Partnership Management - measuring which partners help you sell more, and ensuring Sales leverage partners effectively to deliver real 'solutions'.
  • Brand Awareness - ensuring prospects and potential recruits know who your company is, what they do, and why they are an industry leader.

Action Plan:

    1. Determine Strengths & Weaknesses - use our downloadable Sales Support Effectiveness Survey, to highlight which areas require immediate attention and those that can be resolved over time. An email to both top performers and strugglers is simple data collection method.
  1. Take a Modular Approach - sales support is a large topic encompassing everything from branding to systems to managing partners. Benchmark your current effectiveness in each area first before tackling each aspect. Focus on CRM as it is the #1 investment priority for mid-sized enterprises for 2006.
  2. Prioritize Wants from Needs - salespeople will go to great lengths to blame their poor performance on marketing and its faults. Validate survey feedback with top performers to understand exactly why they are successful.
  3. Create Action Plans - once you have identified key initiatives, work with other departments to collaborate on solution architecture. In many cases, I/T will be required to facilitate your goals with strategic technology deployments.
  4. Plan for Ongoing Assessments - as sales support is one of the most critical functions of your department, plan to audit your performance at least semi-annually. Additionally, invite a sales leader to one of your strategic planning meetings to further identify what is working and what is not.
  5. Track Improvements - revisit Sales Support Effectiveness in 3-6 months by doing another brief survey. If you have done a good job, you should see quantified improvements backed by your Sales departments. At the very least, you will be able to identify new challenges to add to your 'To-Do' list.

Bottom Line:

Marketing cannot rely on gut-feel when it comes to performance measurement. Work with Sales leaders to build a performance measurement process around sales support efforts like demand generation, lead management, and CRM.

Sales