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McKinsey On Sales Process Failures -- 75% of Reps' Time Spent Not Selling!

Unused PhoneThe boffins at McKinsey have just issued a stirring call to "free the reps"!

According to the consulting company, at one representative global firm, 75% of inside sales reps' time was spent not selling!

This frustrating sales situation is not uncommon, despite what McKinsey says is "the guiding principle of all sales operations", which is "to maximize time for selling and relationship building".  Of course sales people and sales executives, and probably even general management, all know that sales people should be selling.  But given that sales people everywhere are facing similar issues, it's helpful to have a spotlight on the situation.

As a professional B2B sales person focused on BPM, your host is naturally interested in the subject of the McKinsey article -- and how BPM is one point of leverage for improving sales operations.  The McKinsey article also raises larger questions about sales management; your host has now commented on these issues in the letter below. 

You can read the whole McKinsey Quarterly article and follow up reader comments including your hosts' comment, at the following URL. (Please note you will need to register, although there is no charge.)

Identity, Transgression & Connection: Capitalism And Sales

Abstract:  The Management Innovation eXchange (“MIX”) is a think tank funded by McKinsey, Dell, Gartner and others for the purpose of crowd-sourcing ideas for management innovation. Under the MIX umbrella the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey have sponsored a “Long-Term Capitalism Challenge”. Capitalism can be seen in both positive and negative lights, by both champions and detractors. The MIX brief identifies three challenges to the future of capitalism, specifically interpreted here as ethics, patience and alienation. Tackling these problems requires the best possible understanding of capitalism. But missing from most explanations of capitalism is a theory of sales and selling. Sales and selling, as expressions of comparatively free contracting, are unique to capitalism, and distinguish capitalist social organization from Soviet-style state-directed economic relations, feudal/hierarchic economic relations and economic formations defined by force, violence and crime.
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