ProSales’ multi-client research program, Sales Efficiency Study III, provides unequivocal evidence that failure to match a customer’s purchasing requirement (customization or standardization) with the appropriate sales logic (complex or traditional) has a significant effect on the bottom line.

Whenever this mismatch occurs, the value of the deal or of the business relation will be too low to justify the sales effort and the profitability per sales hour expended will be poor. We refer to this as semi-complex business. Regression analysis shows that reducing the proportion of business that is semi-complex with 10 percentage points increases the operating margin by about 1.5 percentage points.