Why are sales teams so inefficient?
In 5 years of business development, I have almost never witnessed a single efficient sales team
7/14/20263 min read
“There are four of us in Sales. We don't have time for prospecting.”
Source: 60–70% of all tech sales teams. All day long, they're sitting through pointless meetings and getting absolutely nothing done in a passive-aggressive open-plan office.
“We don't have LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It costs €1,000 a month, so we have no prospects to contact…”
Source: The Growth Manager and Head of Sales at a major tech startup (they're getting ripped off by LinkedIn sales reps).
“We don't do cold calling, we do GTM [...] Our cold outreach sequences just don't book meetings.”
Source: A French scaleup's “Head of GTM”.
“When I make a cold call, I say: Hi, this is XXX. Am I disturbing you?”
Source: A Head of Sales at a French tech startup.
(Well, to be fair, it's pretty rare to meet a Head of Sales who's actually made a cold call. So credit where it's due.)
“My target is 400 cold calls per month.”
Source: A French full-cycle Account Executive at a major American tech startup, saying this as though it's an impressive achievement and a high volume of cold calls.
Anyway, everywhere I look, I see entire sales teams that are completely incompetent, sometimes to an almost absurd degree.
At the same time, it makes sense: Heads of Sales are incompetent, so their teams end up being incompetent too.
I've come across good Heads of Sales before, but only on LinkedIn. In real life, I've never met one.
Maybe this is simply how things normally work across all industries:
Agencies and freelancers are the actual experts who do the work.
In-house employees play office politics and barely get anything done, while doing their best to look busy.
How to Progress in Your B2B Sales Career
The problem is that if you want to get ahead in your organisation based on merit, you're going to have a hard time. Companies don't reward actual work.
The harder you work, the more work they'll give you, not necessarily more recognition.
What's more, strangely enough, the most useful and effective work is also the most looked down upon.
If you're in Sales and you make cold calls, you're basically the office loser.
Yes, it's that bad. Sometimes, the startup world is no better than a group of immature teenagers.
If you want to progress in your career, you'll have to form an alliance of stupidity with your incompetent manager and the rest of the hierarchy. In other words, you'll have to play office politics.
After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with that if you don't mind it and actually enjoy playing that game.
But if, like me, you simply cannot stand such widespread, mindless inefficiency…
Or if you struggle to respect or appreciate professionally incompetent people…
Then you'll have to build your career around freelancing or starting your own business.
So Why Is Learning How to Prospect So Important?
Companies with strong sales performance are often those founded by people who actually understand the sales profession.
Otherwise, founders end up hiring a Sales Director blindly, without knowing whether they're any good. That Sales Director then does the same thing when hiring salespeople, without knowing how to develop their skills.
And that's how we end up with the situation we're seeing today.
Founders have every reason to learn sales prospecting themselves, so they can instil that culture throughout their organisation and build genuine sales excellence across the board.
Freelancers have every reason to learn sales prospecting to survive, grow their revenue, and never have to go back to the nightmare of a full-time corporate job.
Salespeople can also benefit from learning prospecting, as it gives them the opportunity to join companies where those skills actually make a difference (because, obviously, not every company is completely useless).
By the way, I'm launching my digital training programme in the coming weeks, with a special introductory price for early buyers.
It includes everything I've learned over five years in business development, including two years as a freelance cold caller working with dozens of companies.