Whack-a-mole sales strategy definition: A transactional phase. To be reactive to tasks and activities to the extent you often go to work with the mind set of not structuring your day/week but instead resigned to the fact that you will be fielding, questions, enquiries and problems all day, week or month.
Does that sound familiar?
Recent research from the Aberdeen Group* has shown that sales people spend less than a third of their working day actually selling. Time pressures have always been part of a sales environment but have been exacerbated in recent years, with increased expectations from above, financial strains and market conditions.
Sales teams following a whack-a-mole strategy rush over to tackle one issue only to discover that three new things have cropped up in the meantime. Many sales professionals focus so strongly on handling these day-to-day tactical matters that there’s no time left for strategic thinking. With new industry trends also popping up it is no wonder that breaking free from a reactive culture can be extremely difficult.
How to cure this condition
You can either decide to pick up more hammers (more staff, more money, work harder) or prevent the same old tasks from popping up time after time.
Organisations that have made the shift from reactive to proactive have done so by using sales automation solutions, using various tools to help add structure and consistency to the sales effort. Read more about this here.
Sales automation solutions are a great way of identifying an inefficient process and targeting improvements. Rather than a linear process or a funnel, successful companies are more aligned to a wheel.
We researched this issue with sales leaders we know and as one of our clients summed up “We are trying to create an infrastructure that allows us to scale up efficiently whilst keeping the customer at the centre of everything we do. By utilising intelligent software and understanding our customers’ needs we are trying to create a culture of effective problem solving rather than frantically troubleshooting.”
Wouldn’t you like to work this way too?
Find out how
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*Research from The Aberdeen Group: leandatainc.com
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