Are you frustrated managing sales people but not getting the results you expect? Have you tried to apply the newest theories of sales productivity management with less than outstanding results to your multi cultural sales force ? If so, you’re not alone. What the new science of sales force productivity (Harvard Business Review article -sept 06) does not tell you is that it is still as much an art as it is a science. Yes you need to understand the why, but yes you also need to master the how, and not everyone can do effective sales productivity management from one day to the next…However, whether you are a small business owner managing a couple of sales people, or a Vice President of sales running a worldwide sales organization, the concepts of sales productivity indeed do apply to each and everyone of your salespeople. Now, how do you use it to their advantage (and therefore to yours), still depends pretty much on how well your sales organization can execute on these concepts.
But first things first : what exactly is sales productivity, how can you measure it, and most importantly how can you influence it to boost your sales up – and with the same team …?
Sales force productivity : a production approach to sales
If you have ever run a consulting business or a Professional services business, your revenue forecast was based on your people production: your delivery organization was living by the following ratios : chargeability, billability, average price per day, per person, average number of bid investment days, etc..Well, sales productivity boils down to creating the same kind of “people based forecast”, but for sales people only. If you use a regular sales forecast that is opportunity/account based, the Sales volume total should of course be the same on both reports, but what your sales productivity forecast brings to the table is 2 extra things :
1 a past/present/future picture for each of your sales persons, that adds value to your opportunity based forecast and therefore to your “forecast confidence factor”
2 an early warning system for each of your sales person based on simple ratios specific to their sales cycle, that tells you in advance whether or not the sales person is on the right track (before the month/quarter is over…) regardless of what he/she tells you
By providing these 2 “hard facts, data analytics” based reports early enough to the sales manager, he/she can then use this extra information to inspect business in a better, more informed and more predictable way. You can now influence your sales forecast upwards proactively by asking better questions from your reps, instead of trying to understand what on earth happened despite what all they were projecting (“trust me I am going to close that deal!…”)
Philippe Le Baron – Sales Productivity Manager
