Sales force cost is one of the highest spending expenditure incurred in any business today. It is not like that it requires a big pile of money, but the money is spent to make sure the results are acceptable to the organization. The effectiveness of these costs sometimes not live up to the expectations.
So this becomes a problem which needs to be taken care of as quickly as possible. It is not possible for any organization to see the biggest budget department not working according to its expectation.
It becomes very important when measuring sales force effectiveness, you need to think about several factors that would contribute in a useful way for the organization. Segmentation is a necessary job which sometimes leads to a failure of the product if not calculated carefully. Segmentation can be done in various ways i.e. it could be according to the age of the people, gender differences or location. All these factors are essential in defining your target market and if any data is not taken properly, the results would be nothing less than a disaster.
The other thing is to have a focus on the message i.e. what you have been planning to do and how you intend to do that? It is very important that you understand what are you selling and what you want your target customers to know about that particular product. The main focus should always lie on high number of sales because more the sales, more the profit. That is the basic thing which your company wants you to do.
It is advised to spend more of your time on the customers who have been giving you the benefit rather than to those who are just wasting your time and are becoming a bad influence on your personality. You may have to do a cost benefit analysis for these types of employees so that you get a clearer picture of your plan and also improve your work efficiency.
‘Customer is always right’ this should be the first thing in your head when you are on the mission of measuring sales force effectiveness. It is your customers whom you are selling and their preferences should be fulfilled by these sales representative.
Marketing segmentation will also prove to be useful here because if you have correctly defined the right customer, it will make your work easier. Easier in a way that you would have a picture of what you will be about to do, but you will be acting as your own guarantor to make that work. Convincing anyone for anything would be a really difficult job but this is what sales people do.
You have to keep in mind that what prices your customer can easily pay. We are living in a very competitive world and if we are not ready to make compromises, we are good as dead. You don’t want to lose your customers because of the prices, so what you do is make an adjustment in your profit.
If you make a budgeted plan for losing some amount on the profit, you are actually earning a lot more in the long run. The cost of retaining a customer is much appreciated than spending on a new customer. Sales force can be determined by the sales data, if you find yourself in a position you are earning little bit of profit and also retaining the customer, you have done your job successfully.
More the sales you have made to a particular customer more are the chances for that customer to prove to be fruitful to your organization. It is not just that one particular person who will prove to be useful to you but would recommend others and that would be the time you will see expansion and success in keeping a customer.
The industry faces a lot of problem when hiring a new talent to handle this big responsibility. First preference would be given to the employees who have already been working for your organization as it would save you time and cost of going through the recruitment process.
If that is not the option, you should better be ready to do some training in a useful way. There are very less chances that a new person is aware of your full business structure that how it operates and what it actually does inside the organization. You have to be ready to spend some extra to give these new people both on and off the job training so that they get more quickly use to your business structure.
In the end make a summary of what could be done to measure sales force effectiveness. Number of things which will come in handy would be customer detail from the help of segmentation, price changes according to the trend, training, motivating your sales team and results. All these factors should be kept at a top priority in a sales department.