If you had a dollar to invest in your business, how would you decide where to invest? We realized that many of our clients are facing this question, and are struggling to come up with a good solution. This prompted us to investigate how other companies are handling investments so we could find the answer.
A common theme we have seen over the past two years is increasing investment into key accounts, which lead us to wonder:
It’s no secret the customer buying experience has changed the relationship between consumers and businesses. In fact, many sales organizations have become irrelevant to today’s buyers. Consumers are more empowered with their own data and research and they are coming to sales organizations with the solutions vs. coming for the solutions. At an Atlanta Sales Leadership Community event we talked to executives from Cox Communications, Kaiser Permanente, and Georgia Pacific about how this impact has affected their companies.
Here are some initiatives your sales organization should implement to meet the demands of the customer buying experience:
The market is getting more and more competitive for top sales performers, which is why your sales organization may be losing top talent to competitors. This could either be helpful to you in ways you haven’t realized, or serve as a symptom of a serious issue within your sales organization.
Find out how to keep your regrettable losses at a minimum:
It goes without being said that one of the most critical decisions you can make is hiring the right staff into your company. The other half of the battle is keeping the right staff. Before we dive in, if you’ve missed the blog post on the cost of a bad hire – go here to learn how to avoid the $250,000 mistake and practices your sales organization should adopt in this process.
While the cost of hiring the wrong person is an astounding $250,000 per bad hire, the cost of losing a top performer is even greater. When this person walks out the door they are taking their productivity with them. So, you now must invest in finding a replacement as well as trying to close a big gap in your plan. On a personal level, you will likely need to spend a lot of your time trying to care for your recently departed team members customers while you try to manage their transition.
There are dozens of blog posts, articles and statistics devoted to the value of bringing in the right talent into your organization. At the Atlanta Sales Leadership Community panel, we learned that the average cost of a bad hire for a company is $250,000. Take that number and multiply it by just four and you are looking at a million dollars’ worth of error.