Correlation: Salespeople Strong in This Competency are 2125% More Likely to be Performers

My wife and I were on a Mother’s Day walk when we saw something I had never seen before.  I should have snapped a picture but I didn’t, and could not find a single picture on the internet that captured what we saw. So I went to Neural.Love and used AI to create the image above. The waterfall and lagoon the site added to the image was nice a bonus!

Looking at the mountain in front of us, the lower third was bright and vibrant green, with full-sized leaves on the trees.  The middle third was a duller, lighter green with new, young, and still growing leaves on its trees.  The top third of the mountain was brown, high enough in elevation that the leaves had not yet popped.  To make the mid-May look even more mystical, there was a slight haze covering the browner, top third.

The sight was very nice to look at but regular readers know that it could only be an analogy for something sales related.

Three things came to me at once.  The Hot and Cold Game came first because the colors on the mountain had to do with temperatures and in this case, hot, warm, and cold.  For some reason, Sales Process came next and I combined the three thoughts.

There is a correlation between sales process and sales success.  I once estimated that when a sales team did not have a company-wide sales process that their sales team followed, and such a process was created, optimized and executed, a 25% increase in sales followed.  Today I dug through Objective Management Group (OMG) data and will share my insights below but first, let’s review the attributes measured within OMG’s Sales Process competency.

Here is what I found:

Only 35% of all salespeople have the core competency Sales Process as a strength (greater than 66).

Filtering by Sales Percentile, 82% of the top salespeople and 5% of the worst salespeople have Sales Process as a strength. The best salespeople are 1640% stronger at Sales Process than the worst salespeople.

An alternate way to look at the Sales Process core competency is through average scores.  The worst salespeople (bottom 10%) score only 21% on Sales Process while the best salespeople (top 5%) score 77%.  The average score for all salespeople is 49%, eerily similar to the percentage of salespeople that hit quota in 2022.  The best salespeople score 367% better!

I also analyzed performance data and after filtering on salespeople who were not performing (below 80% of quota), only 4% were strong in the Sales Process competency.  The opposite of that analysis revealed that of those who were performing, 85% were strong in the Sales Process competency.  Salespeople who are strong in Sales Process are 2125% more likely to be performers.  That is very strong correlation!

Companies and their salespeople who are closely aligned and following the sales process are hot and green.

Companies and their salespeople who are not as closely aligned but still following the sales process to some degree are warm and light green.

Companies and their salespeople who are not closely aligned with or following the sales process are cold and brown.

Another way of putting this is that if you don’t currently have a consistently effective, staged, milestone-centric, customer-focused sales process in place, you are probably being frozen out from winning some opportunities.  If you do have a sales process like that in place, your salespeople are probably on fire, winning the lion’s share of opportunities.

Light a fire under sales process!

The Sales Process competency is just one of 21 Sales Core Competencies measured by OMG.  See all 21 here.