How to make more sales with fewer salespeople

Whitepaper shows how to reconfigure your sales function to reduce operating expenses while doubling your volume of sales appointments

Let’s be honest. All’s not good in sales.

In the last 20 years, we’ve adopted some funky new methodologies and some impressive technology — but not a lot has really changed!

Salespeople still operate like artisans — personally responsible for the entire end-to-end sales function. Salespeople are still not truly a part of the team. And salespeople are still hideously inefficient — an average salesperson performs just two sales appointments a week!

Four appointments a day, five days a week

With tough times ahead, now is a good time to reflect on how we can improve the performance of the sales function.

The direction of the solution is obvious. We need salespeople to focus on what they are good at: which, presumably, is selling.
If you consider that a salesperson has the capacity to perform four (sensibly planned) appointments a day, then it should be possible to have one of your salespeople perform ALL of the sales appointments that are currently being performed by a team of 10!
Think of it another way. If you currently have five salespeople, you could have your most capable salesperson perform all of the appointments currently performed by the entire team — and still have time to make the same number of calls again!
All that’s required is that you shift responsibility for non-sales activities to other resources.

The dilemma: sales up; customer service down

While the direction of the solution may be obvious, how exactly to achieve it (without doing damage to the firm) isn’t so clear.

The problem is that it’s all but impossible to extricate salespeople from all of their other responsibilities. In most organisations, the salesperson effectively owns the entire customer-interface. In other words, if the salesperson were to focus exclusively on sales, it’s highly likely that customer service would be severely compromised.

Our recently-released Whitepaper shows why this dilemma exists — and how to resolve it.

It paints a new picture of the sales function — and of the relationship between sales and operations. It shows how to free salespeople from technical and delivery-related activities — without compromising customer service. It demonstrates the importance of a sales support team — and explains why this team (and not salespeople) must manage sales opportunities. And it shows how to provide your (downsized) sales team with all the sales opportunities required, without spending an additional cent on promotion.

Get this whitepaper now!

Our new whitepaper is called How to build a high-throughput sales process.  It’s a detailed introduction to what we call Sales Process Engineering — the application of process-engineering principles to the sales function.

To request this whitepaper, simply send an e-mail to [email protected] with the word WHITEPAPER in the subject line.  Our autoresponder will dispatch the whitepaper to you immediately.

When you’ve done that, please feel free to review some of the articles on this blog.