CSO Insights Blog Posts

First Decade Gone -- And Not a Moment Too Soon

We are starting the second decade of the 21^st Century and the first seems to have gone by in a flash. Good thing. We started with the Y2K scare, which didn't happen, and ended with The Great Recession of 2009, which did happen.

Y2K was scary because the original programmers only included 64 columns for data and saved two of these precious columns by only including the last two digits of any year in date fields (e.g., 96 instead of 1996). The fear was that airplanes would stop flying, ATMs would stop spitting out twenty dollar bills, and you might get trapped with an unattractive smelly person in an elevator between floors until the next century. Not good.

With lots of prophylactic programming and the purchase of TONS of new software and hardware in advance of that midnight hour, those that remained sober enough to do so held their breath and watched the seconds tick off until some minutes into the New Year of 2000, they could begin breathing again. Ten years later, a much larger number of less sober individuals waited expectantly for 2009 to end, when they could blow horns, howl at a Blue Moon (really) and say "Good-bye (and good riddance)" to the decade. C'mon 2010! Yeah, Baby!

In between these two decade bookends was a tech bubble that grew larger than the eggplant that ate Chicago, then burst, wiping out so many dreams of early retirement and so many high-paying high-tech jobs that nobody thought we'd recover. We did, only to see a repeat with the global financial crisis and accompanying burst of the housing bubble. Dreams of early retirement morphed into hopes of eventual retirement and anyone with a job considered himself or herself lucky.

All along the way we've been surveying and analyzing sales performance metrics. On February 1^st we will release our 2010 Sales Performance Optimization report. More than 2800 companies responded to this year's survey (data gathered in Q4 2009) and we will be reporting that the decade ended with the toughest year ever since we began recording data (1994).

Percentage of reps meeting/beating quota, DOWN to the second lowest level ever. Percentage of revenue attained DOWN by the biggest one-year drop we've registered in sixteen years. Turnover was low as reps adopted the "T-Rex Approach," which is: "If I don't move and don't draw attention to myself, maybe I won't get eaten."

Still there were firms that did well, that not only survived but thrived in the past year. Regular followers of our research will not be surprised to learn that these were the companies implementing higher levels of sales process, consistently using the sales methodologies and enabling technologies their companies have adopted, and improving access to sales knowledge.

We've turned the last page on the 2009 calendar and are already halfway down the first page of 2010's. It was a tough slog. The results we'll be releasing in two weeks suggest things will be better but not much easier this year. Happy New Year! OK, party's over; back to work.

Sell Well,

Barry Trailer

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