Consider these lessons from a retail pharmacy setting versus B2B sales setting:
- The average duration of a script customer lifecycle we found to be 4 minutes and 53 seconds (customer presents at dispensary, drops in script, waits for processing, collects script, receives counsel, pays and leaves). How much time do you allocate for a planned, best practices, face to face visit with a customer?
- At the dispensary, 48% of the customers time is spent engaged with a staff member while the other 52% of the time they are disengaged, left on their own. Of your planned, best practices, visit time, how much is spent engaged with the customer versus time spent doing other things ie: disengaged from them?
- Take the time to add value for your customers with each visit. Take interest in them, their current issues and needs and try to add value over and above. For example: Pharmacists were observed on average to only add value 9% of the time they engaged with a customer, value neutral conversations contributed to 62% of engagement time, 25% of the time was spent on risk management and 3% on value destroying conversations. Of the time dedicated to engaging your customer, what proportion is value adding versus value neutral, risk management and / or value destroying?
- When observing script processing, on average staff spent 2 min and 1 second actively working on the script. Another 2 min and 14 seconds saw the script just sitting idle on the bench. What about your customer orders? Order to delivery times and delay times- how would these measure up?
- What about the sales team itself – task allocation – can some of the work the Sales Exec (Expert B2B / pharmacist equivalent) is doing be assigned to someone else (Customer service / technician-assistant equivalent) leaving them more time in the field on value adding activity? Think about of the amount of time key ‘Sales Execs’ spend placing orders into the system, studying the stock counts, organising the production/orders for additional stock, answering calls which could easily be handled by others… 3/4 of the day is spent doing this rather than using ‘expertise’ out in the field with customers and prospects
So, what does all this mean? Is this how your customers feel about your visits / service? Would they make similarities between their sales visit from their B2B Sales Exec as they might when they visit their local retail pharmacy?
Lessons to be learnt… B2B?