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32 | HIRE
AND
RENTAL
NEWS
| MAY 2012
INDUSTRY IN FOCUS
by John R Treace
I’ve been a part of many sales teams in my career, and over and over
I’ve noticed five common afflictions that affect them, each of which
reduces morale and sales performance. They can be found to some
degree in almost every organisation. Smart management teams
are aware of these afflictions and work to avoid their potentially
destructive impact. Any one occurrence of these problems will not
necessary hurt the sales effort, but if allowed to progress to extremes,
or if multiple conditions exist at once, they can be extremely harmful.
Affliction 1: Wasting sales representatives’ time
One of the prime afflictions of sales teams is forcing them to spend
time on non-sales tasks, for example making accounts receivable
collections, managing product recalls, or filling out reports that do
not directly relate to the sales process. Non-sales management often
requests that reps perform these tasks, but great care should be taken
before delegating them to valuable sales people. If you, for instance,
divert 5% of a sales team’s time to managing customer collections,
you effectively reduce the number of feet on the ground by the same
amount - and the reverse is true as well. Sometimes it’s necessary
to assign non-sales tasks to sales people, but before this is done it’s
worthwhile to audit a company’s sales process to determine whether
they could be assigned elsewhere. Finding as many ways as possible to
remove unnecessary tasks from the sales team’s shoulders will result in
sales increases that will more than pay for the adjustments in duties.
Affliction 2: Poor sales meetings
Another affliction of sales teams is poor or boring sales meetings.
The objective of any sales meeting should be to increase sales -
period. Every high-performing sales person who attends a meeting
will be thinking: “Is this meeting making me money, or is my time
being wasted?” Powerful sales people are self-motivated, and they
intuitively know if their time is being wasted. If it is, management
is hurting sales and morale. Wasteful or unnecessary meetings also
send a clear message that management doesn’t know what needs
to be accomplished to increase sales - and no good sales person will
have confidence in that type of leadership. The simple way to ensure
effective sales meetings is to develop a statement of strategic intent
that includes clear success metrics. This statement will define in specific
terms what needs to be accomplished and the metrics needed to
determine whether the goals set in the meeting were accomplished.
It takes a deep understanding of the business, the market, and the
competition to write an effective statement of strategic intent, and
managers who can’t write them need a better understanding of the
business. The bottom line is powerful sales meetings produce sales and
keep morale high.
Affliction 3: Poor strategy
Ineffective marketing or sales strategies will always negatively impact
the sales team, and this is especially true for teams selling commodity
products or services. A player with small market share who enters a
commodity market without a well-defined and well-implemented
strategy can be assured of certain death. These types of companies
usually say: “It’s a huge market, and we can grab some of it,” but
Five common
afflictions of sales
teams