In the case that you offer, I would venture a guess that although you might have called them “Sales People” your sales force was probably doing more of an “Account Management” role. In other words, they spent the majority of their time working with the existing base of accounts – and yes, new sales into the base was part of their responsibility.

It is very difficult to improve the productivity of an established sales force without making some changes to the structure. A colleague of mine once said that field sales organizations have an “infinite ability to absorb productivity”, meaning that no matter what improvements you throw at them they don’t produce more revenue.

You are correct that there are a lot of moving parts that need to come together. The strategy in which it is implmented can also make a tremendous difference. For example, shifting some of the traditional field sales activities to telesales or online channels, combined with the implementation of an efficient SFA program and increased management scrutiny.

Sales people don’t need to love you. They need to respect you, be motivated, and produce.

John

I worked for very large multinational organization (>$2B/yr) that had close to 3,000 professional sales people worldwide. Our initial surveys of sales showed that they only spent 11% of their time actually selling. The rest of the time was tied-up with things like supporting implementation, placing and tracking orders, problem solving, and other administrative type activities.

After several years of major efforts to restructure and retrain the salesforce we were able to get the number up to the low 20s. Still that may be considered a low number, but it represented an effective doubling of sales time. (Interestingly, we did not see a doubling of revenue.)

One might argue that the mere “observation” of how sales people spend their time resulted in a change in reporting, not necessarily a change in behavior. (This is metaphysical debate of the observer affecting the observed.)

The survey itself was a huge challenge. The initial surveys of “how do you spend your time?” did not yield reliable data. What we decided to do was to take a daily random poll of 10% of the salesforce with a “what did you do today?” anonymous survey. Over time, we found this approach to provide much more reliable data. This method requires a rather large population and long period of time to get significant results. (Initially, we implemented 100% tracking of all activities for the entire salesforce. That was met with extreme opposition.)

This is a challenging issue and there is no one magic bullet. Running a successful sales organization requires leadership, mentoring, training, and coaching. It needs to be supported throughout the whole organization. It requires a clearly defined sales process that aligns with the company’s business model. It’s not just about removing barriers, but it’s also about providing direction on what they need to be doing and how they should be doing it – set expectations and hold the organization accountable.

The goal is to extract all the efficiency out of the system to enable people to achieve higher quotas and make the business more profitable. I have spent many years doing this for a number of companies and it is absolutely possible to improve performance of most sales teams by 100% or more.

I’m going to begin writing a lot more articles on the topic of business and sales performance improvements, so stay tuned. Normally companies would charge HUGE money for the knowledge I’m about to begin dishing out for free…

John