Sales effectiveness refers to the ability of a company’s sales professionals to “win” at each stage of the customer’s buying process, and ultimately earn the business on the right terms and in the right timeframe.
Improving sales effectiveness is not just a sales function issue; it’s a company issue, as it requires deep collaboration between sales and marketing to understand what’s working and not working, and continuous improvement of the knowledge, messages, skills, and strategies that sales people apply as they work sales opportunities.
Sales effectiveness has historically been used to describe a category of technologies and consulting services aimed at helping companies improve their sales results.
Many companies are creating sales effectiveness functions and have even given people titles such as VP of Sales Effectiveness.
“By analyzing sales force performance, managers can make changes to optimize sales going forward. Toward that end, there are many ways to gauge the performance of individual salespeople and of the sales force as a whole, in addition to total annual sales.” In a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing managers, 54 percent responded that they found the “sales force effectiveness” metric very useful.
source: Wikipedia