Here at SPI, we receive many questions about how to improve sales performance from clients, prospects and interested businesspeople - but the one question we hear most often lately is: “What can I do RIGHT NOW to improve sales?”

This anxiety about producing immediate results is no doubt a product of the current unpredictable economic environment. Selling is generally tougher these days, and people in the sales profession are feeling the pinch - in a very personal way. Having run sales organizations at companies such as IBM and GE Capital, I understand all too well the current dilemma of sales executives – ‘Do we make some changes now to improve our sales position or do we just try to work harder and smarter?’

McKinsey published a white paper last month titled Cutting Sales Costs, Not Revenues. The article began as follows:

“There’s a reason companies fear experimenting with the sales force: It is the engine that drives revenue. No matter how patched up or spluttering that engine may be, the thought of overhauling it fills senior executives with dread. To keep sales flowing, companies will make piecemeal ongoing repairs as long as they can.”

Very few companies can afford to initiate a sales transformation initiative mid-year. However, after reviewing the findings of the latest research on sales productivity, and after interviewing many of our own clients, we have found that there are three things that almost any sales executive can do to generate significant and quick improvements in their team’s results. These three things are:

1. Target and prioritize sales efforts on accounts with the highest potential
2. Create new latent sales opportunities
3. Differentiate the value of your offerings, not just the price

What’s most interesting about these recommendations is that a surprising number of companies are not doing these things today. Instead, they are simply “paddling upstream faster” by making more calls or increasing the amount of sales activities, which simply generates a larger number of poor quality opportunities, most of which never close.

For many sales executives, it seems converse to logic to think that when times get tough, the best thing to do is to focus your energies on only those places where you can make the biggest and most immediate difference - the specific accounts where you can deliver real value and thus, create new, highly qualified sales opportunities.

We’ve created a landing page with a little more detail about these three recommendations for impacting sales in 2009. If you’d like to know more, click here: http://www.spisales.com/SellLess2009.aspx

Good selling.