The goal here is not to reinvent the wheel on how to design and manage the sales force, but to give you a step-by-step process to reconfigure an existing sales force to make it successful within the context of an integrated multichannel system. Let’s get started.
1. Focus sales force activity on large account acquisition
The big issue in most sales forces today is that field reps spend lot of their time on small transaction with existing customers. This is because reps feel more at home dealing with familiar customers than with going out and acquiring major new accounts. These small transactions in existing accounts is a colossal waste of highly-skilled, highly-compensated sales reps. Therefore, the first step in a sale force redesign for integrated multichannel selling should be to pull your sales force out of these under-leveraged situations and push them into right types of sales opportunities. This can be achieved by:
- Redefining sales force territories in terms of large accounts instead of geographies or industry verticals, which will force your sales force to concentrate on major accounts.
- Defining "right" opportunities with precision, so that sales reps can focus their activities on the best opportunity. There are many ways to define a right opportunity, most common of which are:
- customer size (in sales, number of employees, etc.),
- potential purchase volume (e.g., > $2M/year), and
- specialized need (e.g,. high customization)
- Reducing the number of accounts that reps can manage at any given time. This encourages them to spend less time on existing customers and to look for new high-potential businesses.
- Eliminate sales force’s role in fulfillment and post-sales support.
Nothing can get the sales force back into the street and over to new customer sites faster than prohibiting their participation in an account after the sale has been closed.
2. Use other channels to offload low-value selling tasks
In a multichannel system, a sales force's time should be spent primarily on high-value selling tasks. These tasks include account planning, negotiation, and sales closure. These are high-level tasks which result in closed sales and require the highest level of skill. Other tasks are important but generally have a less direct relationship to actual revenue production. These tasks include lead generation and qualification, proposal writing, fulfillment, and customer support. These tasks take up an awful lot of sales rep's time—often over 50 percent of total sales rep working hours. Getting some or all of these tasks off their plate is a key source of leverage and the reason for sales force productivity.
3. Provide field reps with more extensive technology support / information
Large, complex account selling requires a consultative approach. A sales rep needs to position herself before clients as an expert partner. This is only possible if she has access to up-to-date business development focus data, including: customers’ industry data, key facts, buying issues, breaking news, customer purchasing events, customer promotions, key account movements, departures, competitor wins, awards, new sales opportunities, etc.
This business development focused information helps sales reps move a sale in the process and perform a realistic account planning. Most of this information is available freely. The trick is to gather and deliver it to sales reps using reliable technology. Customer relationship management (CRM) and other database systems are major tools in improving the productivity of a sales rep. Social CRM is the next evolution of traditional CRM packages.
4. Redesign sales force training
Within a multichannel selling environment, your sales force is not only working with high-end customers—who are notorious for their distaste for tricky closing techniques and sales scripts—they are also navigating the account along with other channels. Reps have to know how and when other channels should be included, excluded, managed and integrated in the completion and support of a sale. All of this exponentially increases the complexity and difficulty of a sale rep’s job. Traditional training won’t do any justice to your sales force's retooled role. Your sales force will need more sophisticated training in: basic customer need analysis, large account management, multichannel selling, and emerging social media tools. Only when your sales force is empowered by such coaching will you have a real leveraged sales force.
5. Align performance measurement and compensation with a large account focus
As in any organizational initiative, performance management and compensation play a critical role in realigning sales force behavior towards the new objective of key account development. In particular, compensation system should be redesigned to reward reps for focusing on larger accounts, selling more effectively into those accounts, and working cooperatively with other channels.
These five simple steps will allow you to redesign a successful leveraged sales force with high level of productivity and efficiency. In any sales force redesign initiative, it is critical to keep in mind two central facts:
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Customers have their own needs and expectations.
In many industries, a field rep is still the de facto standard. Customers expect to work with a face. It is worth confirming what customers want and expect before narrowing sales force participation to a smaller segment of the marketplace. -
A sales force consists of people.
A strong and committed sales force is a company’s most important asset and should always be treated as such, especially when big changes are taking place. Many well-intentioned corporate initiatives fail because people in the field don’t support them. As a result, it is important to execute a sales force redesign in an orderly manner and to get a buy-in of the sales force before, during, and after a process or system redesign. Without this crucial step, you may fail.