In this article, here, Marc Benioff CEO of Salesforce is left fighting off the fallout from an all hands call. 

In this Linkedin article, here, by my colleague, Lenwood Ross, Lenwood says

"Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently announced more layoffs but not without creating more controversy at his company.

It's clear that the CEO is looking for answers.

From his statements, I'd guess he's upset about the need to layoff off so many workers, and he's concerned about one number in particular, "96 percent of the company's annual contract value [is] being delivered by 50 percent of sales account executives."

So how can Marc resolve these issues? 


When I worked in corporate, as a leadership team we had two issues to sort

1.Why do we have 7 salespeople that make 200% of the number, what is it that they do?

2. How do we get the forecast 96% accurate?

Let me deal with the second one first.  We used social to do this, the company had its own enterprise social network (ESN), and this was 9 years ago, now we would use Slack.

Slack is product (which Marc Benioff owns) that if used correctly you can see which salespeople are contributing, you can also see which salespeople are not contributing.

You can new starters contributing faster, returners contributing fasters and we worked out that you could get in effect 25% more people in the business by using a ESN.  

So if he wants to know what is salespeople are doing, you just need to look on Slack, if you are using it properly, of course.

Marc's answer sits within his own company. 

Why do we have 7 salespeople that make 200% of the number, what is it that they do?

1. They attended training every quarter the people that didn't make their number didn't.

2. The people that exceeded the number always updated the CRM, the people that didn't update the CRM didn't make their number.

3. These overachievers always took holiday, the B-players didn't.

4. The 7 salespeople had at least 200 contacts per account they worked on.  They were seen as "experts" and often their biggest deals came from the client coming to them saying, "we have this problem, do you think your tool could solve it?".


Want to know more about social selling, check out my new book

"social selling techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition".

In this brand new edition, I have updated all the text, I have also got 15 practitioners, so people who are doing this already to explain how they are get (practical) business benefit. From the CEO that has been running a digital business for over 18 months to sales leaders who use social selling every day.  

Articles on how these business have and are implementing digital, from Mercer, Telstra Purple, Ring Central, Cyberhawk, Namos, Ericsson, Crux Consulting, DLA Ignite and more.

It's available on Amazon worldwide.  Link to Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here.