Sales Survey 2009, The State Of Sales In The UK

I recently partnered Aaron Wallis sales recruitment in producing The State of Sales in the UK, a sales survey, the largest of it’s kind in the UK. Over a period of 6 weeks nearly 800 sales professionals competed the survey and the answers made interesting reading. I am going to be talking about some of the finding and what they mean for you in future blog posts but for now here are the headline findings…

• An impressive 31% of sales professionals are currently over target (28% of respondents were non-targeted) and despite what the media states only 4 in 10 sales professionals are either ‘on target’ or ‘below target’.
• Getting clients to make decisions, cold calling and sales admin/paperwork were cited as the 3 most difficult aspects of selling in 2009. (This would explain why my most popular training programmes this year are my cold calling, face to face selling and sales mindset programmes.)
• The two biggest motivators to keep sales staff (or what they’d look for in a new job) were i) opportunities for progression/career development, and ii) Their employer’s products, reputation and competitive edge.
• ‘Aggressive and Dictatorial’ were the most popular words to describe their line manager’s style though this was thankfully followed by ‘Supportive and Empowering’.
• 58% felt they did not receive enough training in their role and 36% had not received a single day of training in the last 12 months.
• The majority, 64%, would prefer the opportunity to earn £10,000 in commission than receive a straightforward £5,000 basic salary increase.
• Half would not accept a 50% pay rise if it would severely impact on their ‘work-life’ balance.
• ‘Better management and direction’ was cited as the biggest way to make a salesperson more successful (2nd was ‘Increased Marketing’, 3rd ‘Better Work/Life Balance’ and 4th ‘Training’).
• 96% of the respondents enjoy working in sales. Of the remaining 4% only 1 in 10 had planned to embark on a career in sales.
• A whopping 72% judged their career to date to be ‘7 out of 10’ or more.
• The way that the respondents personally measured success was i) ‘being respected by friends, boss and peers’ followed by ii) ‘loving relationships’ and iii) ‘peace of mind’. Status and material wealth was deemed as the major success measure by just 13% of the sales professionals surveyed.
• 70% of those that were unemployed had been recently made redundant.
• Only 11% of those in employment felt that their employer was dealing well with the financial crisis.
• Over 4 in 10 of the female respondents were Sales Managers, Sales Directors and Managing Directors, almost a two fold increase on 2007’s results. However all respondents that earned over £100K in the last 12 months were male.
• 53% had been 100% honest in every interview they have attended throughout their career.
• 44% were educated to HND or higher.
• Despite the economic situation 52% were given an increase on their 2009 targets.
• 56% of respondents felt that sales was the most influential department/division of their business.
• 65% felt that they could perform their line manager’s role more effectively than them (84% of these were male!) even though more than 8 out of 10 described their relationship with their boss as average or better!
• Surprisingly three quarters of respondents did not feel that an increase in green initiatives by their employer would have any positive increase on sales.
• More than 8 out of 10 of respondents considered themselves to regularly work under stress levels of medium or higher.
• 79% of respondents typically worked in excess of 40 hours per week with a third of the total working in excess of 50 hours.

Want to read more? Check out the full Sales Survey 2009.

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