How did your football/rugby team go last weekend? I am a hapless AFL Richmond supporter, so many weekends I cannot bear to turn to the sports pages to read the obituary. When the Tigers do crack it for a win (even a draw is cause for celebration for Richmond fans), I can’t wait to rip the wrapper off the Sunday paper to digest the commentary and all the stats. In fact, I Iove to read the stats table more than the bloated summaries from the so-called editorial experts. Do you know the sorts of tables I mean? I think they have them for ARL as well. You can see just about every sort of stat for every player in your team, as well the opposition. Not only the basics like number of kicks, marks, handballs, goals and points scored, but the really interesting stuff as well……….hard ball gets, inside 50’s, tackles for/against, contested vs uncontested marks, to name just a few. I get a really good sense of which players have done the really critical things that contributed to the win, which players were serviceable and which players were passengers. I bet the coaching staff use these stats to marshal their individual player performance, improvement and training programs for coming weeks accordingly. Crikey, the sorts of stats they gather these days, no wonder the players are so accountable and feel so transparent.
Imagine if, as a sales, marketing, customer service, general manager in your company you could replicate this sort of scientific measurement for performance management. Well you don’t have to imagine! Leading organisations are already doing it…………… and gaining spectacular sales growth as a result.
For a sales team, the key is finding a way to measure the visits sales people are executing in a way that scientifically shows the targeted quantity or rate, as well as the qualitative value of the visit – to the organisation and the customer. On an even playing field across all reps in the team. In such a way as to be able to list top to bottom performance across the team. Just like the league tables that the papers construct for the 22 players in our favourite footy teams. Then the trick is to be able to link these visit measures to the outputs they should be focussed on delivering – number of prospects converted to customers; number of customers converted to preferred supplier status. For every rep in the team. Then the trick is to link these output measures to financial outcomes, ie sales growth performance, sales performance to budget, etc. In other words an integrated league table for the whole sales team…..visit activity inputs, sales process outputs, sales financial outcomes.
Australia’s largest sales management research project:
Underway
We are collaborating with Monash University on Australia’s largest sales management research project. We are pleased to announce that the project is now underway. We will be in direct contact soon with more details about how you and your colleagues can participate.
THIS MONTH’S ARTICLE WAS CONTRIBUTED BY GLENN GUILFOYLE
Glenn is the founder and principal of The Next Level. With a B.App.Sci and an M.B.A, he has spent 20 years in a variety of sales and marketing management roles. Overlapping some of this time is 10 years in business process re-engineering across a range of industries. Glenn has spent many years consulting to international businesses as well as to some of Australia’s best run companies such as: Westfield, Pfizer, Pacific National, Minter Ellison, Ansell, Visy, Australian Unity, Alphapharm, Australia Post, Coffey International and many more.