The Harvard Business Review article “The Trouble with Salespeople”
reports that despite investing even more in sales employees, results are not
improving. Just 9% of sales meetings end in a sale and only 1 out 250
salespeople exceed their targets. In fact, only 1 in 3 working salespeople are
considered “consistently effective".
We were not surprised at
these findings, but continue to be perplexed as to why so many intelligent
executives continue to invest in hiring and retaining people who cannot meet
expectations or are ineffective at demand generation.
Why would an employer
want to retain a poor performer and continue to throw good money after
bad? It’s not only the poor ROI that’s a problem, but according to the
study, 63% of the salespeople actually drove down performance.
Retaining poor performers does not just translate into missed opportunity but the loss of sales that a company had within their grasp. When you add up the salaries, travel, marketing, and benefits, the cost of lost opportunity is huge. Even if the average cost of a meeting is $160, it takes $1,760 of profit per sale to cover the cost of a failed sales meeting!
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