Sales Force Effectiveness
Why measuring sales performance matters
Sales management is a structured and disciplined process involving lots of people and many activities. If you don’t measure what’s going on in the process, your organisation will miss valuable opportunities. Inability or ignorance towards measuring the sales efficacy will result into waste of valuable resources like time, money and will have demotivating effect
on people.
Its important to translate your marketing strategy into a concise, well-defined sales task. Measuring sales results feeds right back into your marketing team so they can take these results, adjust the commercial strategy, and start the sales management cycle all over again.
Sales management is not just patting people on the back and telling them to go out there and do their best. It’s a disciplined, managerial process based on data and well-defined processes to keep your company successful in the face of stiff competition.
Define the sales task in sales management
There are four questions you answer to define the sales task
- Which customers are we going after?
- What are you actually selling?
- What activities must be accomplished, how many calls do you want them to make, and what do you want them to do when they get in front of a customer?
- What support do you want your team to have from within your company?
Measuring Sales Inputs for your team
Evaluate your sales team's customer calls
Sale representative should be really motivated to see the right people. But there are many reasons why that might not be happening. For example, the representative might not understand the sales task. Perhaps the customer target is defined too vaguely. Or the representative has no information or resource to pin down exactly where the customer is. Another reason reps may be falling down here is their lack of sales planning skills. If they’re inefficient, they’re probably spending too much time driving around to make their appointments, or they’re spending too much time with their old, familiar customers because it’s comfortable. This wastes valuable selling time
Ensure your sales team sells the right products and services
Your sales plan and your marketing plan may be in sync with respect to products and services you want your sales team to sell. But that doesn’t mean the sales team is doing it. You need to measure this so you can take corrective action. Otherwise your sales could be affected. There are many reasons why reps may not be selling the right products like, Maybe they have a great relationship with certain clients and they’re comfortable selling just the same old products that they know well.
Sales representative may not like the particular product or they don’t trust it, that it’ll work as advertised so they avoid selling it. Sales team not aware of the sales task. Perhaps something changed in terms of selling direction and they somehow missed the memo.
There might be a training issue. They may be using old sales techniques, or they may not understand the technology or features of a new product.
Speaking of time, reps may have such a large territory that they’re spending too much time driving or they have too many accounts
Assess internal support for your team
This element is critical because without proper support, representative won’t get the job done. Depending on the nature of your business, sales team will have a variety of reasons to have connections back to the head office.
For example, they may need help resolving a customer problem. That might be a billing problem, a late delivery, a product return. Sales team may need help from your technical experts on getting products installed at the customer site. They may need help from marketing on creating new selling tools. In some selling roles, pricing negotiations are essential and this usually requires support from the finance team or often they have to negotiate contracts with the client so they will need support from your legal department You don’t want your sales team running around the company looking for support in the wrong places. This wastes valuable selling time and it may be irritating for both sales team and your internal support people.
Measuring sales outputs for your team
Measure customer satisfaction for your sales team
Irrespective of your sales representative continuously achieving the targets, you cant really conclude your customers are completely satisfied. Its possible they are not satisfied? They’re still buying from you, but they’re not happy. If that’s the case, your long run potential business is at risk.
That’s why you need to measure what’s going on in the minds and hearts of your customers.
Evaluate sales deployment
You may have a very strong sales team, but what if they’re deployed in a less than optimal way? Measuring performance here will help you make adjustments to your territory structure and your quotas. The first area you need to dig into is your Salesforce structure. Have you deployed your sales team in a way that maximizes what they’re trying to accomplish in terms of the sales task? For example, do you want them to be product focused, customer focused, or geographically focused?
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