Top-Performing Sales Organization | Sales Research

What do sales organizations with the highest win rates, revenue growth, and sales goal achievement do differently than the rest? Where do they focus and what factors make the biggest difference for success?

In the Top-Performing Sales Organization research, we set out to answer these questions.

While quite a bit of research has been published on what separates top sellers from the rest, there’s relatively little on what organizations are doing.

We studied 472 sellers and executives representing companies with salesforces ranging in size from 10 to 5,000+. Thirty-seven percent of respondents had less than $50M in revenue, 38% had between $50m and $1B in revenue, and 27% had greater than $1B in revenue. Respondents were located in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific, and represented 26 industries.

We analyzed results across the 8 categories of the Sales Performance Wheel^SM and studied the factors that correlated to higher win rates. We learned that the Top-Performing Sales Organizations, across all industries and company sizes, are strong in similar areas that have great impact on their sales organization’s performance.

In our Top-Performing Sales Organization Benchmark Report, we share the results of our research, including:

22 graphs and charts comparing Top-Performing Sales Organizations to The Rest across critical sales topics
Recommendations for building out all 8 categories of the Sales Performance Wheel^SM at your organization
Ability to benchmark yourself against research participants using RAIN Group's Sales Organization Maturity Model^SM
A better understanding of what you need to do and where you need to focus to improve your overall sales results

You'll receive insight into how to optimize your organization to improve your results.

Fill out the form to download the report.

We found that Elite and Top Performers have significantly higher capabilities than other sellers.

Only about half (46% to 54%) of the Elite Performer group is willing to agree they have effective training in each of the areas we inquired about. The Top Performer group agrees with the various training area questions only between 25% and 41% of the time.

This represents a huge opportunity and advantage for those companies willing to strive for ‘agree’ answers in each training area. Achieve effective training and you increase capability. Combine this increased capability with strong sales management that directs capable people to use their time well and pursue top performance, assisted by the right performance enablement tools, and both new opportunities and win rates will go up substantially.

Based on over 70 years of sales research and behavioral science, the Sales Performance Wheel provides a guide to help leaders analyze the influences on sales success.

Strategy: Go-to-market strategy, value proposition, priorities, and effectiveness of the leadership team.
Structure: Sales compensation, territory design, and territory, account, and lead assignment.
Operations: Data management, analytics and reporting, forecasting, pricing, and quotas.
Enablement: Sales management and coaching, sales process, sales method, technologies, and tools.
Talent Management: Strength of talent, competencies, recruiting, and onboarding.
Training: Seller development and the organization’s culture and investment around training and education.
Capabilities: The strength of skill levels across the various areas needed to sell effectively.
Motivation: Sellers' attitude toward selling and leadership’s ability to create and sustain motivation.