Lunch Gets Ordered but Our CRM Data is Dirty

An eye opening bit of research from the Sales Secrets online newsletter from Miller Hieman shows a surprising ROI from off loading adminstrative duties to a dedicated Sales Operations team.

Here are a few excerpts from the article -

The Problem

Only 60 percent of sales organizations have dedicated sales operations staff, while 90 percent have dedicated administrative staff.
So lunch gets ordered … but your CRM data is dirty.

Do You Know Which Role Is More Critical To Improve Sales Performance?
Many organizations don't measure the impact of sales operations support. Support roles are just not included in their measurement culture. Sales leaders typically do not track the productivity of these resources and, more importantly, do not compare each type of support position to the other. Here lies the rub – since organizations many times cannot afford one of each, they must rank them against each other to decide which role best impacts the bottom line.

The Impact of Pre-Sales Support
*Miller Hieman defines pre-sales time as including all sales related actions prior to closing, including but not limited to face-to-face or phone-to-phone client encounters.

• Offloading admin activity to gain more pre-sales time.
  Of the salesperson's time spent on administrative tasks, 50 percent can be offloaded to either administrative or sales operations support staff (2 hours/week). Those 2 hours can now be spent selling, increasing pre-sales time from 28.4 hours to 30.4 hours per week – an increase of 7 percent.
  
  
• How productive is the extra pre-sales time?
  Sales operations support staff goes beyond data entry, ordering lunch and the myriad of valuable administrative tasks the admin team provides. Sales operations support not only ensures the quality of the CRM data, they also "mine" the data to provide a 30-thousand foot view of sales activity. They provide focus for resources and actions needed to move deals to closing. By maximizing the efficiency of the salesperson's pre-sales time, they directly impact the end result.
  
  
• The bottom line. Greater salesperson productivity. 
  We've found that organizations with sales operations support staff have 18 percent greater productivity per salesperson than their peers with simple administrative support. 
  
  
• And increased productivity results in 150 percent more revenue.
  Hiring administrative staff yields 7 percent more pre-sales time and $7 million in potential new revenue and does not measurably impact productivity.

Here's a link to the complete article... (please note that you need to sign up for a free account to get access)
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