“The single biggest inhibitor to sales process improvement is the lack of detailed benchmarking data about how well sales teams are executing their sales activities,” says Todd Youngblood, YPS Group managing partner and chief executive officer.

Without a standard for comparison and a way to measure deviation from those standards, there is no way to know when improvement occurs. The online Sales Best Practices Benchmarking Assessment will help us gather baseline sales performance benchmarks for the industrial and construction distribution industry. Distributors can then compare their sales practices against the industry standard in order to establish a sales process engineering approach to improve sales.

Youngblood uses the assessment tool to help organizations improve their sales performance.

“With a number of clients, we have found that using a seven-component sales process engineering approach can generate an incremental, annual 8 to 12 percent increase in sales per rep,” he says.

The initial stage of the project consists of gathering information from salespeople throughout industrial and construction distribution firms about their current sales practices. After compiling the data, we’ll publish results about the sales practices currently being used by distributors, the effectiveness of those practices, and explain how distributors can better apply each practice for measurable sales growth.

This editorial appeared in the July/August 2003 issue of Progressive Distributor magazine. Copyright 2003.