Improving Sales Productivity
Understanding your ideal customer has wideranging implications for selling and managing.
The productivity of a sales model is a function of three things: capacity (how much the sales force can do in terms of call capacity and the capacity of salespeople to reach various customer groups); the close rate (how much they sell); and profit per sale (what they sell and at what prices.
(see "Analyzing Sales Productivity.")
to improve sales capacity, managers need to get people to work harder and more effectively ----for example, to make more calls or do a better job at generating leads in the sales pipeline.
But to increase close rates and accelerate selling cycles, managers need to get better at identifying and selecting potential deals along the opportunity spectrum and then managing target opportunities more efficiently.
This is a key output of an ideal customer profile analysis ang process.
For example, as businessprocessingCo. gained more insight about itscore customers and shared that insight across the business, it was able to improve training, deployment, channel selection, call lists and close rates.