9 Characteristics of Successful Selling Organizations

Does your company share the characteristics of such successful selling organizations as SAP, Oracle, CA Technologies, SalesForce.com, Monster.com, Cisco, Clear Channel, and VMWare? These are just a few on the Forbes 2013 list of top selling organizations.  These are all companies that:

• Outpace their competition
• Are leaders in their markets
• Consistently deliver profits year after year to their share holders
• Are capable of hiring great sales representatives

We previously wrote about the 3 benefits of being a market-oriented and customer-focused organization so we narrowed the list down to 9 characteristics that top selling organizations share:

1. They all have a vision of what they want to be and have the entire organization aligned on it.
2. The all foster a culture of continuous improvement and learning where employees are expected to challenge the status-quo and help increase revenues, decrease costs, and increase efficiency.
3. They all operate under a sense of urgency.
4. They are all very process driven with a repeatable sales process.
5. The are able to hire superior sale people because the have sales processes and systems in place.
6. They are all results focuses and not activity focused.
7. They all have leading indicators and metrics in place to measure success that is focused on new business and not just any business.
8. Their compensation plans are aligned with the goals of the organization so their people are rewards to produce the right results.
9. They all have strong sales leadership and a strong sales management function.

So how does your organization rate for these characteristics? Do you have some of these characteristics, are you strong in any of them and weak in others, or do you not have any of these? We invited you to be part of our survey to see how you rate your selling organization based on the 9 characteristics listed here.  The results will be published in November 2013.

Please feel free to contact us if you need help with building these characteristics into your selling organization.