Using Selling Objectives To Corral Random Acts Of Sales Support

In an effort to improve the productivity of the sales force and drive more revenue, business-to-business (B2B) companies are inadvertently making it harder for individual salespeople to do their jobs. Uncoordinated but well-intended initiatives generated from many different organizational silos seem to salespeople as random acts and overwhelm them with too much information and not enough purpose. To combat this complexity, sales and marketing organizations need a common, structured way to agree on what needs to be created, how it will be organized, and how these efforts will be measured to evaluate their effectiveness. Forrester has defined four selling objectives as a framework for organizing various sales support investments, while also providing a foundation to provide executive leadership more transparency into the cause-and-effect relationships between investments intended to support sales and their contributions.