How to adequately account for it in taking your sales team modelling to The Next Level
“How long do you allow for when it comes to typical or average visit duration?” I asked three people this question – each person has a significant stake in the answer.
• “oh could be anything from half an hour to well over an hour”
• “I reckon the average would be 45 minutes”
• “it would be around 30 minutes”
This sort of variability in response would be expected for stakeholders from three different companies. The problem I faced in fielding these questions and answers, was that they were from stakeholders that work closely together in the same sales organisation! There are is a host of reasons why such sales leaders should be clearer and more consistent in their perceptions. Two reasons stand out.
The cost of sales and cost to serve continue to escalate; on-line commerce is disrupting many traditional sales channels, and numerous sales organisations are questioning the return on investment in mobilising their expensive sales team like never before. The justification of the cost of a visit must be at hand, clearly understood and defensible. It becomes poignant then that visit duration (range, and average) must also be at hand, clearly understood and defensible.
This first reason flips to the second main reason. Visit design, programming, and partnership planning them (visits) with key customers becomes increasingly imperative for training and briefing the sales team members to operate within the correct band width and to know what and how to implement in the environment of each and every “hour in the sunshine” (the visit). It becomes poignant then that visit duration (range, and average) needs to be a key parameter in the visit “spec”.
With the visit duration rigorously set, you can undertake your sales team modelling and go on to model any number of permutations in support of visit capacity of the team; headcount/structure/deployment; classified customer base targeting benchmarks; profiled prospect pool targeting benchmarks.