Aberdeen Group's survey revealed that although quantity (primarily) and quality (secondarily) of leads were of paramount importance to sales and corporate management, productivity was the most important factor for sales representatives. In other words, companies believe that their salespeople need more leads, the salespeople think that they need more time — to sell to the prospects they already have and to gain from the removal of administrative and other non-selling tasks.

Aberdeen Group also discovered a very strong (and mostly unnoticed) correlation between the degree of collaboration within a company and the effectiveness of that company's sales force. This finding supports the idea that selling is increasingly becoming a team (rather than individual) activity.

Collaboration is particularly critical between the sales and marketing departments of organizations. Again, Aberdeen Group discovered that companies that had strong collaboration between the two functions had higher sales effectiveness and that this was especially true where there were structured processes and systems in place to support this collaboration.