In consulting with research companies to improve their sales performance, I live by the principle that a problem well-defined is half solved – and so I invest the time to really understand why a sales program is under-performing. In recently reviewing my work with 45 different research companies over the past 3+ years some interesting themes emerged:
From the end client’s perspective….
- I didn’t know your company does that?! A client’s perception of their market research firm is typically limited to their relationship with their account manager and the type of work they are currently doing with the firm – they often don’t know others at the firm or understand the company’s full portfolio of products and services. This represents tremendous opportunities to grow accounts by expanding the network of relationships and exposing clients to a wider range of offerings.
- Give me more! Clients want and desperately need market research firms to be bolder and more proactive in taking steps to help and support them in new or different ways. Sales and client service organizations are typically exceptional at reacting and responding to clients’ requests, but often struggle with taking the initiative or creating opportunities. Doing so involves a more holistic approach, maintaining a longer term view of the client relationship and developing new capabilities – such as more in-depth knowledge of the client’s business and the ability to look across a series of research projects to synthesize results and develop over-arching themes.
- Best of both worlds. Clients have conflicting views of big versus small market research firms. For large firms, they like the global reach, the cache associated with branded solutions and proprietary methodologies, and so encourage smaller firms to “productize” some of their approaches and improve global capabilities. At the same time, clients don’t particularly like that large companies often try to be all things to all people because clients don’t know how to best use the larger companies. By comparison, they enjoy working with boutique firms because it’s easy to understand their areas of expertise and gain access to high-level thinkers within the firm. They also view smaller firms as much more agile, creative and user friendly and challenge the larger firms to be more flexible and client-centric.
Internal marketing research company issues…
- Plan the work and work the plan. In many organizations, the sales strategy and objectives are nebulous or overly-general and are not driven down in the organization through simple, aligned execution plans. Also, there is often a lack of basic sales management discipline in consistently following through and holding individual salespeople accountable for execution – e.g., by establishing clear account plans and executing against those plans.
- Right players in the right boxes. Salespeople are not effectively deployed, either because the sales organization has not created a structure responsive to the sales strategy and objectives, the sales model and/or job specifications are not sufficiently defined, or individuals have little awareness of their personal interests, strengths and capabilities and how best to align with the sales organization’s current needs.
- Pay for performance. Sales performance management and reward systems perpetuate a broadly defined status quo, rather than stretching individuals and rewarding them commensurate with their true value to the business.
- More meaningful metrics. Sales reporting systems are retrospective in nature, don’t track a balanced set of key performance indicators for effective sales management, are not viewed by management as accurate or credible and provide data with little actionable information or insights.
I’d love to hear your perspectives – are any of the above issues challenging your firm’s sales performance? If not, what are your biggest obstacles?
For more information, go to Bill Guerin and Sales Performance Solutions.
