A strategy for coping with tough economic times – Part 2
Sunday, August 16, 2009
In Business Growth
Justin Roff-Marsh
Step three: Free up Your Salespeople
Figure out how to remove all activities from salespeople, other than field-based, face-to-face, business-development appointments.So, activities that must be re-routed elsewhere include opportunity generation (promotions), appointment setting and calendar management, solution-design and proposal generation, customer service and all fulfilment-related tasks.
Step four: Reconfigure your resourcing model
It's likely that you will discover that you need far fewer salespeople (even considering your increased appointment numbers) and more sales-support personnel.Our approach to resourcing is to provide each salesperson with a dedicated sales coordinator (who manages opportunities and plans his or her calendar) and then route all other activities to a promotions person, customer-service personnel and technical experts who provide salespeople with field support.
In most cases it is possible to accomplish this reconfiguration with a negligible (if any) increase in operating expenses.
Step five: Eliminate bonuses and commissions
If you've been waiting for the right time to eliminate this caustic practice, a down economy is such an opportunity.While performance pay makes sense in environments where salespeople are truly autonomous, these environments are few and far between.
As organizations transition to make-to-order (or engineer-to-order environments), the requirement for tight integration between sales and fulfilment becomes critical.
Tight integration necessitates team work, and performance pay for individuals destroys the integrity of teams.
Furthermore, performances pay:
- Signals that optimal performance is optional
- Causes your sales function to become more costly as it operates more efficiently
The bottom line
Typically, when we implement these five steps in organizations, we increase each salesperson's activity level by 10 times. However, in most cases, we also reduce the size of the sales team.A typical net result would be twice the volume of true business-development appointments, with minimal change in operating expenses.
If your current market share provides you with room for growth, this is a strategy worth considering in these slower times.
Justin Roff-Marsh - Managing Director Ballistix www.ballistix.com.au Ballistix is a management and marketing consultancy, specializing in Sales Process Engineering (SPE). The company operates nationally throughout Australia and the United States of America.
