There are countless approaches to the challenge of sales performance improvement, yet few organizations would say they’re achieving the kind of gains in this area that they need. In fact, Miller Heiman’s 2013 sales study has shown that the percentage of companies that qualify as what we call World-Class Sales Organizations is smaller now than it has been at any time in the 10 years we’ve conducted the study. 

On Wednesday, Feb 19, I had the pleasure of collaborating with Jake Schmitt and Patrick Blair from Salesforce on a discussion of improving rep performance. You can find the replay here: salesforce.com/form/event/webinar-sales-performance.jsp

If we could offer one piece of advice to all the sales forces in the world that are striving for better results, it would be this: Get close to your customers. Understand what’s important to them. What are they trying to fix, accomplish or avoid? Patrick gave a great example of putting this into practice: he and his colleagues were working with a company that provides recreational vehicle services, and the Salesforce team actually rented an RV and went out on the road to get fresh insights about their customer.

A question was raised during the webcast about trust. Customers are closest to the vendors they trust the most. It isn’t enough for the individual salesperson to be trustworthy. It extends beyond the rep and beyond the sales force. It begins at the highest levels of the company, and permeates the culture. If you work in a high-trust organization, you’ll find that customers are coming to you to ask, “What should we do next?” Relationships matter—that’s a bedrock principle for Miller Heiman and for Salesforce. 

Inside a World-Class Sales Organization, we find that collaboration—within the team and across departments—is a transformative factor in building close customer relationships. Patrick shared with us some of the capabilities that make Salesforce’s Chatter such a powerful collaboration tool. The potential for technology and social to enrich and enable collaboration in the service of the customer relationship is one of the things that make me optimistic about the future of B2B selling.

Joe Galvin is Chief Research Officer and EVP at Miller Heiman. Joe’s mission is to continuously research, measure and analyze the best practices, innovations and emerging trends for complex B-to-B sales organizations providing clients with on-demand access to the most compelling research and insight required to make strategic decisions.