Pat’s Blog

“Find out what needs your customers want fulfilled today. Then determine how well you are meeting those needs.” — Peter Drucker

The annual J.D. Power customer satisfaction survey results are in and as usual, there are important insights to be derived from firms in the top positions. The Number 1 rated company in the study said, “Our goal is the perfect client experience, which means the company is reliable, responsive and empathetic to the customer.”

It is no coincidence that these are the same innate characteristics shared by top sales professionals and that this particular company has honed its hiring process to assemble a superior sales team.

Financial firms that want to improve their customer satisfaction levels need to first examine whether they are hiring quality sales professionals to create an unsurpassed customer experience.

View J.D. Power survey results for more details.

“All organizations need a discipline that makes them face up to reality.” — Peter Drucker

In my experience, companies attempt to correct sales problems by either adding more salespeople, training the sales staff or demanding better leads from marketing. While these solutions work at times, just as often they will not be successful because the problems may have different root causes.

A more effective strategy is to first, understand the company or team’s sales process and the activities that underlie it and second, view the situation quantitatively which involves having measurements. Herein lies the problem: Many sales organizations do not have any measurements except for the basics or more worrisome, they do not know the sales metrics that drive their sales results.

How do you measure your sales team’s progress? Do you have metrics in place to monitor important sales activities such as lead generation and prospecting?