When we talk to entrepreneurs from different industries about what limits the growth of their sales, one of the topics that inevitably comes up is the performance of salespeople and the difficulty in recruiting more people for that position who are willing to travel to serve zonal clients.
A first consideration concerns the supply of applicants. Worldwide, a phenomenon is taking place that has taken on the name of The Great Resignation, where an increasing number of workers are abandoning their on-site jobs to migrate to jobs that allow them to work from home. This translates into fewer potential candidates.
In addition, we find that the milling sector finds it difficult to recruit people with knowledge of flour and baking, but the same is true for the metallurgical or clothing sectors, just to cite a few examples. This is a cross-cutting phenomenon that makes the supply of applicants a major external constraint.
Faced with this scenario, the challenge behind closed doors is to to get the most out of current salespeople.
While it is true that a salesperson who does not know how to solve his customer's problems will resort to discounts to sell more flour or premixes, before thinking about training or modifying the commission scheme, the first thing we must do is to take immediate action to eliminate anything that detracts from their productivity.
What are we referring to? By way of example, when we applied the SWOT methodology in the workshops with the salespeople, we found that they identified the following items as aspects that are detrimental to their sales:
-
Failure to meet deadlines and deliverables.
-
Sales management pushes for the sale of higher margin products, but when sales are about to be closed, there are often stock-outs of these products.
-
Failure to coordinate actions with dispatch.
-
They have no information or clear guidelines for deciding to whom to deliver merchandise when there is not enough for everyone (which is a paradox).
Regardless of whether he likes soccer more or less, we have all seen Messi in our national team, motivated and shining for 90 minutes when the team is with him, while at other times he has not been able to display his potential if the rest is not in sync.
You can hire the Messi of salespeople or you can strive to improve your current salespeople, but before you do, make sure the rest of the company is not throwing the ball out of the court or giving it to the opponent.
The good news is that companies that have implemented actions to reverse this situation have obtained excellent results. The reason is very simple. A company's ability to create value depends on the degree of synchronization between each of its parts..
If you have investigated the problems that your customers face on a daily basis, you will understand the impact that not having the key inputs for your manufacturing process in a timely manner has on them. Therefore, you will not only be eliminating the factors that detract from your company's productivity, but you will also be building a more efficient a competitive advantage, which makes it easier for the sales team.
