What’s the true value of your field sales team?
Do you know or are you guessing? Leaders in most sales organizations know that an effectively operating field sales team is a substantial contribution to generating sales, controlling the moment where the consumer meet the brand and making sure that the brand promise is kept. But do they know why or is it a gut feeling?
Identify the impact of your field sales team
Investing in field sales teams is a quite substantial part of the sales and marketing activities, but it’s also hard to identify the isolated impact of the investment. Since many sales organizations are facing declining margins due to higher transparency and competition, they might be tempted to reduce the head count in the field sales team, primarily because it’s a great opportunity to save costs and reach the targets. It makes completely good sense if you don’t know the value contribution the field sales team is making and if you are driven by sell-in efforts at HQ level - hoping that stock will disappear because of your marketing departments ability to create pull. On the other side - it is also a very short-sighted way of creating results – it might be wiser to look at the real value contribution your field sales team is making.
Evaluate your field sales team
Here are some questions you may ask yourself when evaluating your field sales team and their performance:
- Do your field sales team know how to create value for the whole sales organization and for the brand?
- How do you measure the value generated? Is it quantitative like number of calls, number of trained personnel or do you also measure on quality and business impact?
- Is your field sales team doing the same things as they did a couple of years ago or have you integrated it in your omni-channel market approach?
- Is your operational model fitted for a dynamic and ever-changing environment? Does it have the agility to change focus rapidly when the market demands it or do or is it lagging?
- Have you created a clear line of sight between your strategic targets and the operational front-line activities – and does your organization know? Internal collaboration issues and lack of visibility often limit reaching the market potential?
- Do you have an incentive plan that supports your strategic ambitions and at the same time allows individuals to be empowered to make a visible difference – or are bonuses based on overall net sales, activations or market share, because they are much easier to measure?
Answers to these questions will probably make you want to revisit your plans for the field sales team, there might be some improvements to be made.
We use SaleMate to get on top of field sales operations
Some say it takes 10.000 hours of practice to reach excellence, but it doesn’t! It’s not the amount of time alone, it’s much more how you practice. To be able to practice effectively, you need a well-structured framework to be able to take insights into actions – at Gorm Larsen Nordic we call that framework for SaleMate (salmate.pro). SaleMate is a SaaS platform and it is probably not the answer to all your prayers, but it supports the strategic objectives of your organization, it respects the different needs stakeholders and entities in the organization have – and it delivers a 10-15% increase in performance by focusing on value creations at all levels. SaleMate is built to increase the collaboration, productivity and performance of sales organizations. Our promise to every user – anywhere in the organization - is, that SaleMate is the most effective, agile, intuitive and flexible platform they have ever used to perform their tasks. We provide the some of the most advanced planning, execution and documentation tools and a clear line of sight in the whole organization – that way we can convert insights into actions and turn actions into results.
Interested? – Feel free to book a demo!
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Jens Brinck
CEO Gorm Larsen Nordic