When it comes to managing the sales pipeline, the competitive gap between the leading companies and the rest of the pack looks to be getting substantially wider.

A recent study from the Aberdeen Group, titled Sales Effectiveness: Getting Sales Back to Selling, found that Best-in-Class (BIC) firms have significant advantages in revenue-related sales effectiveness measurements.

For example, the study found that 96% of BIC firms reported year-over-year improvements in bid to win performance, and 86% reported lead-to-opportunity conversion rate performance on an annual basis. Those metrics dropped off to 26% and 19% gains, respectively for Average firms, and virtually no improvement for those in the Laggard category.

Look at the Leaders

So what are those labeled Best-in-Class focusing on to drive that kind of business impact. Citing such common business challenges as longer sales cycles (67%) and low sales productivity (50%), the BIC firms are typically focusing on:

· increasing sales reps’ use of information by improving knowledge of products and customers
· deploying sales processes, such as increasing the quality of leads, to help reps leverage information and increase win rates

To designate between BIC firms from Industry Average and Laggard organizations, Aberdeen used three key performance criteria:

1) bid-to-win performance
2) order and quote quality performance
3) lead-to-opportunity conversion rate

Not surprisingly, industries with bigger dollar deals and complex selling cycles dominated the BIC group. Andrew Boyd, the co-author of the study and Aberdeen’s Sr. VP & Research Director for CRM, said 49% of the BIC firms were from the high tech/software sector, while banking and finance represented 23%.

A clear trend among those BIC firms, according to Boyd, was a desire to improve the effectiveness of their sales team. “We are seeing a real emphasis on arming the sales rep with a mapping of your company’s product set vs. the competition, as well as a better understanding of the product line and how it matches the needs of customers and prospects.”

To help drive sales effectiveness, the study found BIC firms were planning continued investments in sales information enablers. Among the tools, BIC firms were either currently leveraging or planned to leverage:

· 79% Sales Analytics
· 72% Competitive/Market Intelligence
· 68% Forums for Sales Reps to Share Insights/Lessons
· 52% Sales Knowledge Management

Another differentiator the study found among the leaders of the pack is their analysis of why they are winning or losing deals. “We found that nearly 1/3 of the BIC are already looking at win/loss analysis on every deal and almost ½ of those firms are planning to begin evaluating sales win rates within the next year,” Boyd said.

Lagging the Field

While the market leaders are clearly demonstrating that investing in people, process and technology, it also highlighted the inefficiencies of those firms that have not invested in sales effectiveness. “The laggard firms are clearly having trouble with measurement and therefore they don’t really know where their problems exist,” Boyd point out. “These firms need to understand which key performance indicators to focus on, and then develop a repeatable and standardized sales process to achieve those KPIs. Our research showed that right now less than 1/3 of the laggards said they currently have a standardized approach.”

In addition to the revenue-related metrics, Boyd said there was also a substantial void in operation performance between BIC and Laggard firms. For example, 93% of BIC firms measure sales reps time spent on administrative tasks, compared to 70% for Average firms and 49% for Laggards. The overwhelming majority of BIC firms are also investing in sales collateral automation tools (90%) and proposal generation solutions (87%).

BIC firms have also staked a big lead in automated lead management (72% BIC vs. 57% Average), lead distribution (74% BIC vs. 53% Average), and lead augmentation (76% BIC vs. 51% Average).

For more information the Aberdeen study, contact Andrew Boyd at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .