The prospecting-to-selling equilibrium
Sales & Marketing Leaders and Business Owners should be concerned with maximizing the productivity of their teams.
Often, we see a misallocation of resources, where highly-paid expert salespeople are expected to make cold calls and follow ups to keep their calendars full. They understandably tend to avoid these activities, which are tedious, resulting in good sales prospects falling through the cracks.
The majority of follow up calls go to voicemail. Many emails don't receive a reply. Therefore, it is inefficient for your most expert salespeople to spend hours a day on these tasks.
Your expert salespeople's time is most highly leveraged when they are actually meeting with qualified prospects and closing deals. In theory, they should be spending every hour of the working day meeting with potential clients.
In our experience at Wigler Group, it takes up to three full-time sales development representatives (i.e. people who research prospects, call and email them, and schedule meetings) to fill the calendar of an expert salesperson, thereby leveraging the most value from their time.
We have observed that this ratio is common in B2B SaaS sales teams (typically with the job titles three "Sales Development Representatives" to one "Account Executive").
However, outside of modern SaaS firms, this equilibrium appears to be less well-known.
If you have a team of salespeople (or do the selling yourself), consider how adding someone whose only job is following up and scheduling meetings might prevent good leads from falling through the cracks and maximize the value of your team's (or your) time.
