Over the last few weeks, I have been surveying my contacts on LinkedIn to understand how they feel about sales and their role in it. I got responses from about 30% of the people that I asked which I suspect is quite a reasonable response rate. Their experience working in sales ranged from 1 year to 35 years.

This is a very quick review of the results – a further analysis will follow towards the end of the year.

Has sales got easier or harder over your career?

The response to this is overwhelmingly harder.

This result showed no correlation with experience, with both inexperienced and very experienced people evenly distributed across all three responses.

A number of people felt that it had got easier thanks to their experience which is a reasonable expectation. Any process that you do for a long time will get easier. However, the external factors that affect sales clearly are making it more difficult for everyone.

What is the hardest part of your role?

There was obviously much more variation in the responses to this question. I have categorised them into buckets of similar responses. This broad brush approach is useful for an overview but a deeper analysis is required to understand the issues further. For now, this represents an interesting overview.

Lead generation and long sales cycles dominate the problems that sales people are faced with, which is not a great surprise. However, internal issues accounts for an alarming number of responses, together with a lack of resources. All of these are within the control of each company so should be easier to fix.

“Others” all received one vote each. They included finding budget, forecasting, dealing with rejection, lack of customer time to evaluate technology and understanding the client’s needs.

Further analysis will come in due course.