Better Access to Knowledge = More Productive Sales Force

A recent study by CSO Insights, “Sales Performance Optimization, 2008 Survey Results & Analysis,” contains a wealth of information about improving sales, from lead generation methods to the trends and issues with CRM systems. I found one table in that report particularly interesting and germane to what we do at Altus. When respondents were asked to state what their top priorities for sales improvement were for the coming year, the top mentioned item was not hard to predict: “enhancing lead generations programs,” with 36.4%. But what was less predictable and more interesting was the second most mentioned priority: “improving sales rep access to key information.” With 30.4%, information access ranked much more highly that some of the more usual suspects, like “revising our channel strategy” with only 18.6% and “implementing CRM tools” with 16.9%.

Reflecting on a the statistic, I guess this finding should not be so surprising—when 15-30% of knowledge workers’ time is spent looking for the information they need to do their work, and they find it less than 50% of the time, this is a very large problem indeed. Few productivity problems rise to this level of magnitude and urgency—at least 10 weeks per year per sales person looking for the information they need and finding it less than half the time. For sales, time spent looking for information is time lost in front of a customer or prospect.

That is precisely why we at Altus have been so successful with a number of world class sales organizations.  We use video to capture, share and make accessible the knowledge sales needs to sell, in a reusable format.  With full text search of the spoken word, notes, and slide text, sales can quickly find exactly what they need to be more productive.

And that is why we are fortunately seeing more and more companies making the transition for a reliance traditional training methods to on-demand knowledge sharing with Altus—because people need easy access to whatever they need to know, whenever they need to know it, from whoever in the organization has it, on whatever electronic device they are using. Notice that “improving formal training for sales reps” was not on the priorities list, but “improving rep access to key information” ranked second.