Before beginning a road trip, we try to plan the route at all levels: where we are headed to, what the best way to get there is, what schedule is the most appropriate, we problems we might have, and how to solve them, what to take with us... Nobody thinks about starting out without even knowing where they’re going. However, in the sales plan, this paradoxical situation occurs more often than you might imagine.
When considering the commercialization of a product or service, every company
Is aware that they need to use a sales channel, whether it be their own, indirect, or mixed.
What not everybody does, despite it allowing much greater possibility of success, is make
a strategic plan of the whole process. We will need a sales network, of course, but what is the appropriate size for it? How frequently should sales reps make visits according to their client portfolio? How can we evaluate our team?: attending to the area’s potential or to the sales that the reps make?
There is a series of previous questioning that conditions, to a large extent, what will happen
next, whose understanding, analysis, and answer allows us to approach, with greater confidence, the market we are aiming at. Intuition can be a very useful instrument in certain contexts and in the hands of experienced professionals, but it is not always based on logical or reliable results. The important thing, in a complex and changing environment such as the one we find ourselves in, is planning all aspects of the sales force to avoid chance deciding for us.
Planning, on the other hand, goes far beyond the "before". One of the most frequent errors on the company’s part is treating a new client as a client for life. Nothing could be further from reality. Market circumstances, competition, or the quality of post-sales service received all have a noticeable influence on client abandonment, known as the “churn rate”. While this is a factor common to all companies, one of the objectives the organization must set is keeping it down to a minimum and, above all, avoiding abandonment of the most profitable clients.
As much as one might argue against it, not all clients are the same. The needs of one or another vary, so satisfying their needs doesn’t have to be done in the same way, using identical resources. Our means are limited, so if we are able to distribute and assign them in the best way, we will increase returns on our actions without hurting either the service or the quality the customer receives.
Apart from targeting and assigning channels and resources, appropriate sizing of our sales team will be a determining factor, as well as knowing how to distribute it among the territory. On too many occasions we put our reps in territories where opportunity is scarce, or we leave critical areas open to our competition, in which case they can take advantage of its benefits.
Managing the sales team correctly is something that goes beyond intuition. It is a matter of two key factors: quality of work and quantity of work. In terms of quality, Sales Intelligence techniques are the answer. As far as quantity, coaching and motivation of the sales networks is a crucial element, without which no sales strategy can be successful.