One of the first sales managers I ever had used a saying around the office ” Don’t confuse efforts with results “. That made sense to everybody in the office because if you weren’t making your number you were going to be fired. The issue was that there were new reps like myself in the office and there were the old reps who had all the big accounts. The old reps took their clients to lunch, entertained them at football and basketball games and made sure paper was in the fax machine when they faxed in their orders. Unfortunately for me and a couple of other young sales reps, we didn’t have any of those accounts. Paper in the fax machine didn’t matter to us because nothing was getting sent to us. With that said, the reps who survived worked hard to get in front of new accounts. New accounts didn’t just happen we had to prospect our way in. Good news is we survived and thrived because a lot of our competitors didn’t want to work as hard and the young guys in the office closed a fair amount of new business because of that.
Now with Sales 2.0 and Web 2.0 prophecies of the demise of traditional selling the question needs to be asked “Does activity really matter”? As we’ve launched Jesubi into the marketplace our sales team is goaled on doing 5 demonstrations of Jesubi a week. When you have a product like Jesubi that is doubling and tripling sales reps productivity the only way to get the point across easily is to show the product. We know that for every 8 demos we do we get a new name customer. That really makes the math easy for forecasting and for business planning. In order to get those 5 demos per week the Jesubi sales team is targeting 500 new leads per month from an outbound standpoint. We’re making an average of 5 touches per lead to drive those demos and it’s working. Yes, we receive inbound leads, but those are the gravy on top of the meal. Could we accomplish this without a focus on Activity – NO WAY -
Aberdeen just released a report that we sponsored around “Inside Sales Enablement” one of the interesting statistics that Peter Ostrow the analyst from Aberdeen who created the report shared with us was of the 488 companies surveyed the range from lower class to best in class companies for touches/dials per hour was a low of 4 to a high of 6.5. After hearing this we went and looked across all the Jesubi customers. The average Jesubi customer is achieving over 17 touches/dials per hour. I ask you with a 3X productivity difference do you think Jesubi is impacting their sales forecasts?
Take a look at the Aberdeen report. The link is here to download it, I think you’ll find it insightful.
Good Selling.
Bill Johnson 
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