How many businesses sell with optimal efficiency? What percentage of them only achieves medium sales efficiency? And how many never climb out of the lowest levels of sales success?

You’ll find some answers to those questions in “Sales Training 2011: Uncovering How the Best-In-Class Sustain, Reinforce and Leverage Best Selling Practices,” a new report from Carew International that evaluates sales efficiency against several benchmarks:

• Only 20% of companies are top sales performers where at least 87% of salespeople reach their annual quotas and 60% of all repeat customers increase their orders by 9.5% or more every year.

• A hefty 50% of companies are medium performers where 49% of salespeople reach their quotas and 33% of all repeat customers buy at least 2.2% more each year.

• A troubling 30% of all companies are poor performers where only 4% of salespeople hit their quotas and revenue per sale decreases consistently across the board.

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Those are revealing statistics. They make me wonder, how well does your company perform? If your salespeople are not reaching quotas or increasing the size of their accounts, how can you turn that situation around? Carew International pinpoints these five critical activities that can break the cycle:

• Train your salespeople to engage in more meaningful sales dialogues that center on customers’ business needs.

• Enhance your organization’s skills in lead prospecting, negotiating, and closing sales.

• Standardize your messaging and sales processes.

• Increase the size of the deals that you make.

• Study what your “A” sales performers do and cultivate those skills across your entire sales team.

Case study from the report . . .

When Prudential Insurance was suffering from flat sales, company management determined it was because customers had come to see insurance as a “commodity” that could be bought from any company that offered the lowest rates. To combat that perception, Prudential chose to implement just one of the strategies outlined above, by training salespeople to improve the quality of conversations they were having with customers. According to John Delorenzo, senior vice president of sales at Prudential Insurance, that step alone proved to be a “game changer” that sparked a 3% uptick in sales over 18 months and provided a threefold ROI on the dollars the company had spent on new sales training.

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