This bachelor degree study will deal with strategic measurements within sales. It undertakes an empirical evaluation of the two measurement strategy concepts “Sales Pipeline” and “Strike Zone”. Firstly, the study will explain key advantages of implementing the strategic measurements. Secondly and finally, the potential challenges as well as possible ways to overcome them will shape the structure of the study with the purpose to develop a sales process.   The foundation of the study is based on modern market trends, which is influenced on characteristics such as globalization, increased demands from customers and similarities of products and services being offered among suppliers acting on the market. These aspects among others pressures organizations to establish superior strategies in order to create a competitive advantage. The set up of successful strategies commonly entails the process of converting strategic intent into actionable activities as well as being able to measure them. Therefore the concept of measuring is an important key in developing a superior competitive advantage.   The authors worked hand in hand with the organization Saab throughout this study. Therefore, the thesis is a qualitative single case study of the organization. It will specifically investigate Saabs sales process in the market of global defense security, and evaluate key measurable strategies that can be related to their organization. According to the study findings and the analytical results, the conclusion is that both of the theories “Sales Pipeline” and “Strike Zone” will develop the sales process of Saab if the challenges of the theories can be addressed. This would be in terms of composing complements to reach a number of benefits such as an increased close rate, higher efficiency, reduced bottlenecks in the sales process, higher awareness of what types of business cases the organization should select etc.

Identifying new potential customers and developing opportunities until converted to sales is a critical function of a sales organization. In most industrial business contexts, opportunities are monitored within a sales pipeline or funnel, to track the status and progress from the initial stage until the sale is completed, often using sales force automation tools, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems to manage the process. While much is written about the adoption, usage, and failures of CRM, little empirical research exists to fully examine the levers to improve the conversion performance of sales leads, particularly in a business-to-business (B2B) industrial context. The research based view (RBV) of the firm suggests that competitive advantage is gained from a company’s distinct resources, and that in technology and other fast-paced markets, success is further determined by fast adaptation, in what is know as dynamic capability theory. This research examined certain key sales capabilities, within the high technology industrial B2B sector, to understand the impact of sales effort, sales ability and lead source, on sales lead conversion yield and cycle time. By studying the extensive CRM data base of a large semiconductor company, along with various human resource records, a quantitative study was performed to address this research, while providing useful value to sales managers seeking to improve the lead conversion performance of their organizations. Sales effort, as measured by number of sales calls made per week, and percent of time spent on selling activities was shown to modestly accelerate sales cycle times, but have no effect on the percentage of opportunities that result in wins. Sales ability, measured by annual performance ratings, prior year quota attainment and years of experience showed no effect on cycle time, nor win percentage. The most notable contribution of this research is the illumination of sales effort effects on cycle time, as previous studies of sales cycle time influences have been inconclusive. Against the backdrop of a general lengthening of industrial sales cycle times, understanding that salesperson effort can reduce the time that it takes to win an opportunity can drive meaningful improvements in salesforce efficiency and productivity.

There is a lack of academic research on sales teams, despite team selling becoming more prominent in recent years. Particularly in Inside Sales, there is a lack of clarity as to what are the drivers of optimum team-based selling and their degree of effect on sales performance. We utilize a team-based approach that aims to study the characteristics of Inside Sales teams and their interactions with business leads, using data from a well-reputed leads management software vendor. Based on prior team-based constructs in the literature, we built a framework that posits Quality of Team Composition, Task Utility and Intra-team Coordination leading to different categories of sales performance at various stages of the sales pipeline via their reflective variables. We tested our conceptual model in the following fashion: first, we used text mining on sales results to classify the different stages of the sales pipeline. Following that, we measured the conversion ratio at each stage as appropriate. Next, we discretized each conversion ratio into three levels of performance groups. The outcome variables in the model are different categories of team performance at each stage of the sales pipeline. Subsequently, we used multinomial logistic regression to regress our outcome variables on our team-based predictor variables in the hopes of establishing and validating important drivers for nuanced Inside Sales success. We uncovered new insight regarding team-selling best practices, using pre-identified constructs from the literature which are uniquely suited to teams and also constructs which are aggregated at a team level from an individual level. Our study is especially relevant to the Inside Sales process, as the outcome measures relate to the sales pipeline. Our main finding was that in there is a difference in skills required at different stages of the sales pipeline, in that more customization and experience is needed at the more advanced stages, whereas more repetition of activity is needed at the beginner stages. We also found that smaller team sizes tend to do better in Inside Sales, which was an unsettled research question in team research with plenty of evidence in favor of both smaller and bigger teams. Additionally, even if it was not a primary goal of our study, by virtue of classifying the leads by their final outcomes, we stumbled across an interesting finding, which is that an overwhelming majority of the sales leads tend to stay at one stage in their entire lifecycle. The implications of all our findings are very relevant to both practitioners and researchers of Inside Sales who are interested in team-based sales optimization. More research should be done in the field of Industrial Marketing, building upon what we found to be true for the B2B sector.