If you are leading a sales team in any organisation, you might want to have a look at the following checklist for sales leaders to see if you have them fixed in your function;
1.VISIBILITY
Are your sales team members visible to all your customers? I mean more of wholesalers and retailers. It is very expedient for the organisation to have contact with every sales point of its product no matter how minimal! The last mile to the consumer is a critical part of the distribution value chain and the organisation needs to have the first-hand contact with those points to optimize value form the market. A lot of things happen at this point and the organisation needs to help drive the desired behaviours and activities.
2. COLLABORATION
Does your team collaborate? As much competition amongst team members are encouraged to drive productivity, this should not in any way suffocate collaborative behaviours. As a matter of necessity, there should be sanctions for sales team members who go overboard in competing, those who sabotage a sales opportunity just because it is not coming to them. Competition should be within the confines of helping the organisation achieve the corporate goal, not undermining it!
3. STRUCTURE
Is your team orderly? There is nothing as chaotic as not having a well-structured sales team. In fact, the sales function organogram is part of the start-off kits given to new guys during on-boarding. What this does is that it defines the career path for the individual in the organisation. It shows them that the positions at the top become fewer as time goes by…this is a form of challenge/motivation. They begin to look at the people at the top and aspire that one day, soonest they will take over. With this in place accountability lines are well defined and managed for optimum productivity.
4. BUSINESS TERRITORY
Do you have well-defined sales territories? It is a sure lack of..or best-case defective strategy to allow sales representatives to sell anywhere they like! shows that the management is lazy..yes lazy and do not want to do the meticulous job of configuring the business territories for effective coverage. It is a very wrong way to drive competition, I can liken this scenario to a situation where you drop a piece of bone for 2 hungry dogs..they fight first until one is weak before the stronger one consumes it. Work is repeated and resources wasted, customers will take advantage of the situation, and accountability is up in flames!
5. REWARD SYSTEM
Do you have a system that rewards hard work and performance? If there is no extra benefit for more effort and better results, optimizing team performance will be a mirage. There will be no point for anyone going over the call of assignment to improve individual performance that will boost organisations results, It is easy for team members to just flow with the team as long as they all get their pay at the end of the month. This situation should not be the case for any sales function that wants to grow the business and increase profitability.
These are a few of probably several essential checklists a Sales Leader needs to tick to achieve results. These start the conversation.
As a Sales Leader, you can register for the course Leadership and Management in Sales to improve your understanding and knowledge necessary to provide leadership and management to the members of the salesforce.
