A dearly beloved of ours had recently undertaken its inaugural sales team optimisation exercise , and in keeping with best practices, a year later planning to re-run the exercise with refreshed data.  The company enjoyed almost 10% growth in a flat market, with only partial implementation of the sales team optimisation outputs (the reasons for partial implementation beyond the scope of this post).  Upon dissection of the year that was, Sales Management attributed the most of the growth to the benefits of the sales team optimisation.

At an internal sales meeting, principally called to set the milestones and Gantt for the Year 2 sales team optimisation, a nay-sayer popped up. “ I am not convinced that we should re-run the sales team optimisation!”   “I think we need a list of all the contacts and details in our customer locations more than we need sales team optimisation”.

Learned readers will instantly realise the folly of this objection.  Here is my little checklist for you to cross-compare……….

• This is not an either/or scenario …. Indeed the former is an integral input to the latter
• The list is an input; sales team optimisation is an output.  Amongst other things, it guides Sales Execs on how to best use the list
• An optimised sales team, that had undertaken at least a year of full implementation, would not be asking for such a list.  They would have already generated their own …. As an executed discipline and business rule of sales team optimisation
• Better B2B sales teams pride themselves on the fact that any externally procured list of customer contact names and details will never be as good, as accurate and as up-to-date as its own

Nay-sayer …… please read and digest.