As featured in the December 2007 issue of “Franchising Focus”, the official newsletter of Deacons Franchising.
Deacons Law Firm represents over 200 franchise systems across all industries, and is Australia’s premier national franchising group.
The old adage “what gets measured, gets done”, is never more pertinent than when describing an organisation’s salesforce activities.
As the cost of running a salesforce continues to climb, organisations must seek the best possible return on their sales investment. The true cost of one sales visit by a Sales Exec often runs between $100 – 200 and sometimes even higher, when viewed across industries.
By implementing a salesforce measurement system, organisations can, at a divisional or individual level:
- highlight strengths and weaknesses from the customer’s point of view to establish organisational best practices
- establish an invaluable internal benchmarking system for scientific target setting
- track compliance with best practices to improve organisational consistency and quality
- provide a powerful motivating tool for the salesforce through correlating their activities with actual financial outcomes
So what should be measured, at the individual Sales Exec level?
Actual metrics vary across industries, but must incorporate six key measures to produce meaningful results:
- 1 measure of financial results: eg Sales vs Budget YTD
- 2 measures of sales process outputs: (i) new target accounts won and (ii) existing accounts “signing on” to partnership programs (preferred supplier status)
- 3 measures of critical sales activities: (i) number of visits vs customer class mix, (ii) number of visits vs proactive-responsive-reactive visit type, and (iii) classified customer base visit coverage vs frequency benchmarks