What Do Your Sales Figures Tell You?

The reluctance of managers to effectively monitor selling behaviour is the single most common contributory factor in poor sales performance.

Eighty per cent of the companies I have researched do not have a formal dedicated sales evaluation process, that is, outside an annual performance review, which, is usually a mechanism for salary negotiation. Sales Managers become pre-occupied with the detail in their monthly sales results, claiming they reveal sufficient information to make judgements on individual team members and believe their experience and instinctive judgement capabilities are sufficient in determining what's best for their people. However examining sales figures simply provides financial statistical data and tells you very little about individual potential.

Taking a genuine long-term interest in the welfare and development of the sales team, requires quality leadership, loyalty, commitment, skill, dedication and expertise, topics certainly that were never viewed as very trendy by a certain sector of corporate Ireland who are not in need of further mention right now. Standards and the apparent lack/absence of them in our financial institutions have brought that industry and perhaps our little nation to its knees. Our government who are the watchdogs/ supervisors of the banks cannot claim that the deeds of a few where to blame, because their leadership role implies that their standards are going to be mimicked and reflected throughout society, such is the power of leadership.

The same applies to the corporate scene, where isolating the sales manager, as the one singularly responsible for setting selling standards is both unfair and incorrect. Sales managers, whose peers neglect standards, concentrating instead on profit as a priority, will tend to imitate their peers, believing in doing so, they are operating in a manner consistent with the corporate ethos and therefore, through their actions propagate a culture, that is not necessarily a reflection of their own philosophy. So the comments I received from sales managers and outlined in my previous post, must be interpreted to the extent they incorporate the sentiments of their peers. It will take a brave manager to step outside the corporate line and initate processes that intigrate, seemingly, conflicting corporate priorities, however, that's what it takes. Corporate leaders understandably are keen to produce results for their stakeholders and are frequently influenced by external advisors who operate with a short term focus. Sales managers need to be more pro-active and assertive in persuing what they believe is required in achieving sustainable high performance levels from their teams and when they do, usually find their peers are surprisingly cooperative. It other words the actions of many sales managers are grounded in misguided interpretations and flawed perceptions that frequently undermine their team's selling capacity and capabilities.

Admittedly many sales managers are financially under resourced, so those in need of acquiring outside expertise, in the area under discussion here are frequently left to muddle along on their own.
The costs of engaging sales benchmarking expertise of can vary from anything in the region of between €5k-€ 50k and many companies are not prepared to invest that type of money in something they feel their sales managers are capable of doing anyway. A little bit of 'burying your head' in the sand here, where the whole area is often left untouched and/or conducted 'on the hoof'. Well that was until now because I have developed a little formula that will cost you absolutely nothing only a small investment in time.

By way of answering the question posed in my last post regarding 'what exactly it is you are attempting to measure'? I have developed a form titled RATE ME-Sales Performance Analysis Form pdf and by clicking this link you can review the factors that I believe are universal to all field based selling jobs. This form is going to play an important part in your evaluation process so you are welcome to print it off. I will explain how to use it in my next post so stay tuned!

I have no comments to post as yet because I'm still learning how to get ranked in the search engines, and I've messed up, by not getting my feed set up correctly, however I'm making steady progress. In the meantime if you have any difficulty with the link and/or want to comment on any of my posts so far, please feel fee to do so, I access these on a daily basis, luv to hear from ye.
Cheers
Dave: http://www.davidquinnandassociates.ie/