According to a survey by Gartner, only 11% of sales organisations have been able to drive commercial success while executing a transformation.
Gartner surveyed 234 heads of sales and senior sales leaders in May through June 2024 to identify productivity levers that are most effective for chief sales officers (CSOs) to elevate sales performance. They found that top performing sales organisations focus on action-centered insight and design, radical role simplification and adaptivity by design.
“In the past two years, sales organisations have undergone an average of four transformations,” says Greg Hessong, senior director, analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice. “While CSOs have a variety of mechanisms at their disposal to drive productivity, it’s often unclear which are most effective, especially in a rapidly shifting landscape.
“That ambiguity, combined with the relentless need to hit quarterly targets, leads most CSOs to default to seller-centric solutions that have worked to drive productivity in the past. Unfortunately, these efforts are yielding diminishing returns as many sellers are feeling overwhelmed, unable to absorb the volume of change required.”
While a variety of levers are available to CSOs to increase productivity, historically, CSOs have been uncertain which ones are most effective. As a result, CSOs have defaulted to seller-focused interventions that demonstrate predictable, short-term ROI. Fifty-seven percent of CSOs report using some combination of manager coaching, new/improved tools, and upskilling/training among their top three levers for boosting productivity.
According to Gartner’s Seller Skills Survey, of 1 026 B2B sellers conducted from January through March 2024, 70% of sellers reported being overwhelmed by the number of technologies required to do their work, and 72% of sellers were overwhelmed by the number of skills required for their roles. This leads to significantly less productive sellers.
According to Gartner findings, there are three key attributes that set these organisations apart from the rest:
- Action-Centered Insight and Design: The top sales organisations were found to have a data-driven understanding of seller actions that produce their desired commercial results. They also align sellers to specific parts of the sales process, and use data-driven insights to clarify seller priorities. Organisations with that action-centered insight and design are 2,5x more likely to be among the top sales orgs than their peers.
- Simplify Seller Roles: Simplifying seller roles is statistically linked to being a top sales organisation. In fact, organisations that report relying on simplifying seller roles to drive productivity are 4,5x more likely to be among that elite group of sales organisations than those that do not. These organisations embrace technology to support roles and reduce burden.
- Systematic Adaptivity: Organisations that are designed for change are more likely to weather transformations well. Having analytically-defined actions and simplified roles help make organizations more adaptable by simplifying change efforts and allowing for more precise, targeted change initiatives.