K – Change Your Thinking, Improve Your Sales
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Change Your Thinking, Improve Your Sales
Suppose you heard that you could increase sales productivity by 50%, cut effort in terms of time (elapsed and worked) and complexity by about 60%, and cut correction efforts in half. Would you care? If yes, some new thinking could help your sales performance.
Revenue growth is a key strategic outcome and time is money. Few enterprise leaders would argue with that statement; it makes intuitive good sense. But not everyone knows how to make the most use of those facts. We could start by applying them to the sales function with either of these two formulas:
Improving sales productivity and effectiveness occur optimally by increasing the desired results, revenue plus satisfaction, while reducing effort. The strategies for improving these variables are different.
A common sales approach for increasing revenues is to raise the price of the sold product. American pharmaceutical and cable/internet companies are notorious for taking that path. Sadly, this mindless strategy has an inverse relationship with customer satisfaction. We know healthcare customers who are charged more than ten times the cost today for a medication that has remained technically unchanged over the past ten years. For the ten-year period from 2005 through 2014, the drug cost portion of healthcare increased 17 percent, more than any other Medicare program segment[1]. Many patients now get their prescriptions filled via Canadian pharmacies at a fraction of the U.S. rate. They also are exercising increasing political clout to restrict such price pumped practices by regulating the pharmaceutical industry. Naturally, the firms are fighting such efforts and spending considerable cost, time, and effort to do so. Is their productivity or effectiveness increasing? Maybe, in the short run. But there is an adage worth considering: End user customers always win in the long run.
[1] “A Fix for Medicare Drug Spending”, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 31, 2016.
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