One Data Point Most Sales Teams Miss When Restructuring the Sales Organization

In an earlier post, I shared insights from an excellent article published in Harvard Business Publications. Why this article was timely and needed is several CEOs and CFO’s as well as business owners are all having discussions on how to reduce costs, improve profits, grow market share, and structure our sales organization for the future.

I shared a tool to help business leaders consider much more than revenue by the salesperson when rightsizing and retooling their sales teams in my last post. There is one critical data point everyone must consider in addition when reorganizing and restructuring sales organizations but sadly most will not.

In this post, I will share what this last piece of critical information is you must capture to strategically pivot, reset, retool and reorganize your sales organization to survive today and thrive post-Covid-19.

As I work with business leaders they are frustrated and often anxious about the future of their business.

If you have been in business for a while like me, you have lived through economic disruption and challenges. You adjusted and survived in 2008 and the stock market volatility. You may have seen some revenue disruption after 911 but your team adjusted and grew through those challenges.

What makes this current disruption so unique and hard to navigate?

Covid -19 was not a single event we experienced and worked through. It is an ongoing event with new information daily. Not all businesses have been impacted the same. Some businesses have seen little disruption, some have experienced an increase in revenue and many have seen orders drop off 30% or more. Many businesses are dealing with canceled orders they built products for, customers having difficulty paying their bills on time not to mention the emotional toll this crisis has had on employees, their families, and coworkers.

We adapted with virtual selling, and Zoom calls became the norm for many once outside sales professionals.

Salespeople are using this time to upskill and adjust how they serve their customers by leading with empathy and improving our active listening skills to truly understand how our customers are dealing with this crisis, how have their businesses been impacted and how can we best serve them today?

As I shared in my last post teams are gathering data as fast as they can and searching for trends to develop scenarios and identifying specific trigger events that will activate their future plans.

Teams are pouring over KPI data-hungry for insights to develop plans and lead their teams through this disruptive market condition. The trouble is many leaders have a vision looking at lagging indicators and need to have a much broader and creative view of this situation to develop the right strategic plans for the future.

As I alluded to in my last post there is one major data point I always consider when retooling and reorganizing sales most teams most leaders are not considering.

What is this elusive data point most teams are failing to consider?

Your customer’s voice!

Now is the time to intimately understand your customers and be able to answer questions like:

Why do customers buy from you?

Why don’t customers buy from you?

What do your customers consider your value proposition to be today?

How are your buyers buying?

Has your buyers’ buying journey changed in the last 30 days?

Do your buyers have new buying criteria they did not have 30 days ago?

What do your buyers want and expect today?

What are you doing today they no longer value but are adding to your cost to serve?

In a Harvard article titled: The Most Important Metric You are not Tracking Yet, the author shares how most organizations consider themselves to be customer-centric, but they are failing to take into consideration how their customers’ needs and expectations have changed since Covid.

Many teams again are pouring over inward-facing KPI’s looking for insights, but they are failing to understand CPI’s.

What’s a CPI?

A CPI is Customer Performance Indicators.

The author shares there are two elements for something to be a CPI:

Outcomes customers say are important to them
Outcomes are measures in increments important to the customer

What are some increments that are important to customers?

Time
Convenience
Options
Dollars Saved
Value Delivered

Many people think CPI’s are the same as your Net Promoter Score. Your NPS is one of your KPI’s and measures if someone would recommend, refer others to do business with you. NPS unlike a CPI however does not provide the connection to single intended customer outcomes.

Who in your organization might value a current CPI?

Marketing – how customers are buying, where are they shopping? How they are making buying decisions? What are their exit criteria today?
Sales– what do buyers want and need from salespeople today? What are their expectations on services like the speed of quote, minimum order quantities, terms, returns…?
Product Management– understanding product use cases and identifying if product requirements have changed
Customer Service – customer expectations on metrics like first-time issue resolution, ease of accessing someone, ability to resolve issues quickly and completely
Operations – customer expectations with regards to order accuracy, turnaround time, shipping orders complete?
Finance – tracking and reporting the value you have provided the customer with your product or solution

To make strategic decisions in such a volatile and uncertain business climate we need to consider various sets of data, not emotion.

We not only need to gather internal data and customer voice insights but we also need to do so quickly because in many cases if it takes you months to gather the information it will be too late by the time you try to use it.

Companies that will survive and thrive post-Covid -19 will gather data quickly, capture the voice of their customers and establish current CPI’s then assess their sales and other teams on their ability to deliver to the customer’s stated needs and expectations.

Sales organizations that will not only survive but become market leaders post Covid-19 will gather data quickly accessing many data points and develop strategic plans for today and post-Covid -19. They will be Agile and adapt and often pivot long before their competitors in fear mode making decisions based on emotion.

It’s time to gather your internal and customer voice data to help your team develop your strategic plans to weather the unpredictable market conditions and come out stronger and more effective when it passes.

My goal in this post was to coach everyone to find the voice of their customers today when shaping their sales and service organizations for today and the future.

Leveraging data coupled with the voice of your customer feedback is a proven no smoke and mirrors process I have used for over 30 years to help organizations experience explosive sales and profit growth.

If you would prefer my help providing unfiltered, unbiased data in let’s schedule a call and I would be honored to serve your team and position your team to become stronger today and a market leader in the future.