Those who are extroverts and very good sales are probably not too good at writing or various forms of mathematics. They probably wouldn't work too well on the factory floor or in any of your other business units such as accounting. Nevertheless you must manage your sales staff to make sure that they are in line with their expenses because there is a cost to doing sales. Although they are the team that brings in the revenue, as a business you must do it as efficiently as possible. Okay so let's talk about this for second shall we?
"FORM" is a four letter word to salespeople. If you are constantly making them fill out expense reports, itemizing every single thing they do and micromanaging them to that ninth degree, then you will actually be hurting sales because you are wasting their time. Time that they could be doing what they do best. Happy salespeople are not the ones who are busy filling out forms all day, or trying to mold their sales processes into your nice neat categorized formatted system. If you make them do too much paperwork, they will eventually leave, and you will have defeated the purpose of having a sales staff in the first place.
It's easy to over manage or micromanage a sales team into oblivion, and perhaps it is the need for authoritative control of those who have MBAs and wish to be in charge of everything. You should never have a salesman fill out any form that you are not actually going to look at, or data input any information you don't really need. Often they will write right in the form; "are you actually reading all this crap" and if you never catch that, they won't take it seriously ever again.
Why collect information you don't need anyway? You might think you will need the information later, but chances are you don't. What you are concerned about is lots of sales, and as long as those salespeople are meeting their goals and their expenses are line, you should be happy.
If you really want them to fill out forms and if you really want to measure everything they are doing perhaps so you can duplicate the sales staff in another region of the country, then I suggest that you get them a secretary and have the secretary work closely with each salesperson filling out the forms and putting the data input for them. It's getting tougher and tougher these days to do face-to-face sales because more things are being done online.
Nevertheless, you probably do need a sales staff so you shouldn't be wasting their time. You should allow them to do what are good at, and as long as they are staying within the boundaries you should be happy and encourage their sales goals each consecutive month or quarter. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on Managing Sales Teams. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net/
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