I was at a meeting on Friday with a large UK organisation, meeting with their Head of Sales and their "Head of Sales Effectiveness".  It's the first time I had ever met with a "Head of Sales Effectiveness" so I thought I would do a bit of research.

I found the below quote from Wikipedia - and it is pretty powerful stuff:

'To "win" at each stage of the customer's buying process'.

They wanted to see how I could help them do just that and they told me that they spend much of their time trying to improve their sales processes by tiny increments at each stage of the buying process.

I had already researched that they have annual revenues of £214 Million so if any initiative (e.g. piece of tech, software or additional training of your sales team) could improve sales effectiveness and hence revenue by just 3% - that would be an increase in revenue of £6.42 Million.  That would very likely cover all the costs of the sales effectiveness team's salaries and indeed the cost of the implementation of the initiative.  If you ran 3 or 4 initiatives that have a similar effect, then all of a sudden, having a sales effectiveness team starts to look like a pretty good investment.

So who is in charge of "sales effectiveness" at your organisation and if the answer is "nobody", it may be time to have a look at making someone responsible.