Progressive Distributor - ISA 2007 Issue - Where does a salesperson's time go?

Where does a salesperson's time go?

by Robert Nadeau

To succeed in manufacturing and distribution, you need to acquire and keep more customers than your competitors. Advertising and marketing may help you identify and qualify prospective customers, but acquiring and keeping customers is still the primary job of salespeople.

Advances in technology and changes in how customers prefer to purchase products and services has changed the way this job is accomplished in the past 40 years. Despite these changes, time is still the salesperson’s most precious resource, and it’s usually in short supply.

Of all the fads, trends and techniques that claim to improve sales force productivity, one approach consistently produces results despite the fact it seems so simple. This approach is to give your salespeople more time to acquire and keep customers by identifying and eliminating activities that waste their time.

In most industry sectors, selling has become more time-consuming. The customer’s problems have become more complex, and so have the solutions.

More complex problems require salespeople to spend more time listening and learning about the customer’s situation. Increased complexity of solutions often requires salespeople to stay involved during implementation to make sure the customer gets maximum value. The net result: it takes longer to acquire and keep customers.

None of these changes would pose a sales productivity problem if salespeople simply had more time to spend with current and prospective customers. But again, time is in short supply.

Where did time go?
The key to improving sales force productivity is to identify and eliminate activities that add little or no value for customers and don’t improve the quality of the decisions your organization makes.

Many daily sales activities added value in the past, but take up valuable time today. We can trace much of this shift to the 1980s when the focus changed from managing assets to improving cash flow. As competition increased, management was pressured to improve the flow of cash into the business, often by reducing head count.

Mid-level sales and marketing management was among the first groups to go. Their primary role was to collect, sift through and interpret information coming in from the field and to report their findings to the decision makers. With this management layer gone, someone else was supposed to pick up the slack and continue to analyze this information and report their findings. But with fewer people remaining to do an increasing amount of work, much of this analysis and reporting slipped through the cracks.

Salespeople still collect and report information, but nothing is being done with it. Since information has no value until it leads to a decision resulting in action, it wastes both money and time.

The next big trend in sales force time consumption emerged in the mid-1990s, with the advent of the Internet and the explosion of digital communication. Cell phones, PDAs, laptops and e-mail were all intended to improve communication. But have these technological innovations helped sales force productivity, or do salespeople spend more time responding to communications that do not help them acquire and retain customers?

The problems your customers face will continue to grow more complex, as they deal with globalization, fierce competition and ever-changing customer needs. Companies that develop and deliver solutions will need more information just to keep up, placing even greater demands on your sales force.

Finding more time to sell
Given these conditions, how can you improve your sales force’s productivity? You could ask them to work longer hours. But they’re probably already working more than 40 hours a week.

You could hire more salespeople. But more than likely, you’ll have a hard time finding qualified candidates. Even if you can find them, the only thing that is sure to increase is your costs.

The best way to improve the productivity of your sales force is to free up their time by finding activities that consume their time but could be done more efficiently — or eliminated altogether.

The Industrial Performance Group is conducting a National E-survey to identify the activities that consume a salesperson’s time. Robert Nadeau, managing principal, will present the findings of the survey at the ISA Industrial Conference and Trade Fair on May 21 in Las Vegas.