CHELMSFORD, MA — (Marketwired) — 12/11/13 — , the innovator in sales execution solutions, today released the findings from its annual Sales Execution Trends survey which examined key objectives for sales organizations, challenges and obstacles faced to meet those objectives, current conditions, and investment areas needed to improve sales execution.
With improving economic conditions, organizations are shifting from maintenance mode to growth mode. Two thirds of companies surveyed indicated that they expect to grow their sales team in 2014. With this anticipated growth in sales organizations, the burden of onboarding and ramping new sales staff as quickly as possible becomes paramount to sales leaders. On average, it takes 40% of organizations between 7-12 months to effectively onboard and get new sales representatives to productivity.
“Sales teams today are burdened with increased complexity in the selling process and struggle to present greater value to customers which is leading to stalled business,” said Christopher Faust, CMO of Qvidian. “Sales leaders must have laser focus on making their teams successful by looking beyond sales enablement to address sales execution challenges. Key to this is aligning and linking existing investments by bridging them in the selling process to drive sales behavior.”
The study shows that sales execution challenges including longer sales cycles, difficulty presenting differentiation, lack of common sales process across organization and poor sales and marketing alignment are impeding sales leaders from achieving their goal of winning more business.
For executive management, one of the most important sales focus area was found to be improving overall quota attainment (87% of respondents). To compound this, 36% said they were only somewhat or not confident in their sales organization-s ability to achieve quota attainment. Reasons stated for not achieving quota indicated by survey respondents were, sales unable to effectively communicate value, sales content not aligned with buyer-s stages, and selling resources not tailored to specific selling situations. Finding needed resources and creating personalized selling documents remains an ongoing challenge for sales teams. Over 39% say they have a challenge with locating and tailoring personalized selling documents and 16% say it is overly difficult.
The ability for most sales organizations to be agile and adapt to change also impacts overall sales execution. 47% report that their sales process is only somewhat or not at all adaptable to change in the buying process and over 57% state their sales organization is only somewhat or not at all agile.
Alignment of sales processes, as well as selling content and sales resources, specifically to buyer needs is critical to improving win rates. However, over 53% say their selling processes and content are only somewhat or not aligned to the buyer stages.
A total of over 220 global respondents from varying industries, market, and company sizes in sales leader and enablement roles completed the survey.
The complete report is available at Qvidian-s website:
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Qvidian provides cloud-based solutions that enable companies to accelerate sales ramp up time, capture new business, and optimize sales performance by closing the gap between strategy and sales execution. The company-s innovative software and advisory services offer real-time insight to ensure sales teams do what-s needed to win, by driving repeatable methodologies and making the sales organization more agile. With over 1,200 global customers including Qvidian is helping organizations significantly increase their profitable revenues while eliminating waste and reducing costs. For more information, visit or call 1-800-272-0047 or +44 (0) 870-734-7778.
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Dana Harris
Red Javelin Communications, Inc.
(978) 440-8392
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