How to maximise your sales resource Return on Investment (RoI)
Go-to-market review. Salesforce effectiveness program. Value chain sales strategy. These are just a few of the initiatives organisations are attempting as they grapple with the fundamental issue of maximising sales resource marshalling and return-on-investment. The tension is often high in an environment like this…..the top line is increasingly harder to maintain and may be falling; the full cost of sales and servicing the customer is increasingly harder to defend.
In a period where it seems there has never been greater pressure to keep the customers we have, as well as find new ones to service, there is a need for a set of simple tools to help business leaders review current sales resource structure, roles, productivity levels and deployment; model alternatives; internally debate and decide amongst the alternatives; plan the new RoI solution; and implement it.
In these difficult economic times, we commonly see leading sales organisations have an understanding of:
- The key elements of the toolset– headcount; visit activity benchmarks; customer coverage; prospect penetration
- The critical inputs:
- reviewing channel sales strategy,
- defining farming-hunting-servicing accountabilities,
- streamlining the order-to-delivery (for a goods supplier) or service-specification-mobilisation (for a services supplier) process,
- and how to qualify and quantify each of them.
- The benefits of a mathematical and methodological approach to classifying the customer base and setting associated visit productivity benchmarks
- The flow-through to defining the prospect pool to be targeted and how to get the right farming-hunting mix for your unique sales resource RoI challenge
- Modelling for alternative sales headcount and deployment alternatives
We would be delighted to offer you a no obligation meeting to discuss how you can maximise sales resource ROI in your business.
Please contact us by emailing info@nextlevelenterprises.biz or calling (03) 8300 0340.
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Did you know The Next Level can offer you Development and Learning Workshops?
We facilitate half-day workshops and whole day boot camps using real sales data, or 1-2 hour presentations – ideal for a company sales conference.
Topics include:
- Sales vs Customer Service responsibility split
- Farming vs Hunting vs Servicing roles split
- Customer Classification /Prospect Profiling
- Account management (farming)
- Prospect management (hunting)
- Face to face sales methodology
- Sales resource return-on-investment modelling
- Sales territory structure & mapping
- Sales scoreboard
- Sales team internal benchmarking
Great article, Glenn – and agree with all of the above.
What role do you think marketing should play in all of this? Understandably, businesses were hesitant (and many unable) to ramp up marketing when this article was written (with GFC doom and gloom abounding).
But, that’s no longer the environment we’re playing in. We’re finding that companies are well and truly gearing up to grow, and willing to invest in a number of initiatives to facilitate that growth. We think a COMBINED, aligned sales and marketing engine is the key.
What do you think?
Again, thanks for the great article.
Sally,
I agree with almost everything you have said. Sadly, I am not sure the world is over the GFC…..but I am not an economist , so I will move onto an area of reply where I feel more qualified. We are of the view that Sales and Marketing should not only be combined in effort and direction, but that Marketing should gear up the Sales Team to be focussed executers, not strategists. Of course this philosophical position will vary on a case by case basis. Notwithstanding we would argue that the starting point for debate within any B2B org should recognise that B2B best practice involves the Marketers conducting all the necessary market and segment identification up-front work……all the way through to customer classification and prospect profiling. Members of the sales team should, on the annual planning cycle, be given their quantified list of classified customers and profiled prospects, balanced against their visit capacity, and be charged with the accountability to go forth and farm and hunt (trap!) to maximise sales. With on-going assistance from Marketing – but a Sales accountability.