We all know that resources (especially people) are expensive, so making certain that our business is running as effectively & efficiently as possible is critical to maximising profitability.

I took part in a survey last year, conducted by MHI Global, that made me think hard about what could be improved in our business. But it also highlighted some areas where conventional business thinking needs to change. Particularly when it comes to the division of responsibility (between Sales & Marketing for example) and a real focus on information sharing across the business.

MHI Global is made up of Miller Heiman, AchieveGlobal and Huthwaite, who between them have surveyed over 30,000 companies with a pure focus on business to business.

This article takes a look at a sample of question I’ve selected from this survey, which looked specifically at sales process and effectiveness, to show exactly what I mean by this. There’s also some background and a link to the full survey results for you to have a look at.

MHI Global were able to rank organisations based on these research results metrics Interestingly only 8.5% of respondents qualified for what they would consider the ‘World Class @ Sales’ performance category.

So lets take a look at 5 of the questions that were asked, and that we think you should answer about your own business, as well as some of the results that were received.

The following results include a split on the percentage of  all  respondents that answered positively and what percentage of the ‘world class’ sales performers answered positively.

Make sure you take an honest look at the questions and decide whether your answer would sit on the following scale:

Strongly Disagree | Disagree | Somewhat Disagree | Neither Disagree or Agree | Somewhat Agree | Agree | Strongly Agree

1. Sales and Marketing are aligned in what our customers want and need.

When answering this question the key elements you need to consider are things like:

How strong is your link between Sales & Marketing?
Is it easy for Marketing to utilise Sales information?
Can Sales pick up easily, on Marketing effectiveness?
Can Marketing easily see detailed sales results from campaigns?

2. Our organisation is highly effective in allocating the right resources to pursue large deals

In other words, how do you identify large/complex deals?

New customer
Value of deal
Products/Services involved in the sale
Can you combine this with the point in the decision making journey?
How can you manage regular and senior review of this?

Do you have a central record where all of the customer/prospect interactions come together?

Can any member of staff pick up intelligently on an enquiry / question?

5. Our CRM system is highly effective in enabling our organisation to collaborate across departments

This is perhaps the most telling of all questions, as you may have gathered, one of the best ways to achieve the right answers to the questions above is to have an appropriate CRM solution deployed across the business. However, as you can see, even amongst the ‘World Class Performers’ only 61% were able to answer positively to this question, and in the overall respondents only 23%!

It is clear that this is one area where getting it right will allow you not only the effectiveness & efficiency to answer the other questions as you would like, but also is the area where the greatest competitive advantage can be gained. One word of caution though… in order to gain the true benefits that we are asking about here, the CRM you choose should have a real focus and history of Integration, Integration, Integration – particularly to your back office system.

ProspectSoft CRM offers unparalleled integration to Access Dimensions, Pegasus Opera, Exchequer and Sage 50. If you answered anything less than ‘Agree’ to any of the above questions why not  get in touch with one our team  to find out how we can help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your business. Alternatively, to find out a bit more about what else we can do for you first take a look at some of our other blogs.

This survey was conducted by MHI Global. A copy of the  full study is available here.