Though the thought would be incredulous to my high school chemistry teacher, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time thinking about science lately.  Not the kind of science that explains combustion or atomic structure, mind you, but the kind that sheds insight on how to make business-to-business selling more effective.

For many executives, selling is perceived as an art, where individual talents like persuasiveness and personality traits such as determination combine to achieve corporate success.  In some ways, this is true:  in a world where 94% of all business-to-business sales revenue is generated by 4% of salespersons, individual skillsets clearly mean a lot.

However, there is a role in sales for the kind of scientific analysis that accumulates data, uses it to establish cause-and-effect relationships, and produces a capacity to predict results.

And this role is growing.  Until recently, the deepest most organizations went within the “science of sales” was to work the sales funnel backward from a sales goal to determine their ideal number of proposals, appointments and phone calls.  But today, driven by greater use of technology – sales force automation, integrated enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) and electronic-data-interchange (EDI) systems – smart companies are using detailed analysis to improve their sales performance.  According to consultants from McKinsey & Company, such a scientific approach can yield bottom-line improvements of up to 15% and top-line growth of 30-50%.

The approach works because it establishes a reliable basis from which to answer questions about the relationship between selling efforts and results.  For example:

• Are you overemphasizing high-volume accounts.

• Do you have too many salespeople chasing small customers.

• Are your salespeople working too many (or too few) accounts to be effective.

• Is your marketing targeting the right customers?

Don’t think that this kind of science is available only to companies with tightly integrated data centers and a team of statisticians, however.  With a little foresight, any sales organization can achieve meaningful results.  Here are some suggestions:

• Have your sales representatives keep simple time sheets to identify how much time they spend on each account.

• Likewise, record by account the time devoted by other staff to sales opportunities – product experts, support staff, senior managers, etc.

• Map your selling expenses (e.g., travel, promotional) to each specific account.

• Track hit ratios and account values by customer size, customer industry, sales person, etc.

Armed with this information, you can then zero-in on where to focus your selling efforts for maximum gain.  The chart below illustrates how this information could be analyzed.

Of course, in your business certain variables may be more predictive than others.  For example, rather than segment by industry, you may want to do so by product line or sales rep, or the customer’s geographic location or ownership structure.  And you may learn more as you increase granularity -- for example, assigning a different hourly rate to each staff member may reveal a stronger ROI than initially anticipated.  Like all good science, experimentation is key.                                                                                                

Science and Sales may sound like contrasting terms, but when you put them together they can produce impressive results. And you don’t have to be a chemistry whiz to try it.  Just ask my high school teacher.

To learn more about the Science of Sales, or The Pursuit Group's Scientific Sales Audit, view this month's presentation.