Five common afflictions of sales teams and what HR can do to mitigate them and help drive the bottom line.
HR and sales don’t always go hand in hand, but John Treace founder of Treace
Consulting, shows that much can done in terms of staff management to help better
engage them and enhance the bottom line while doing so. Through his experience
he has noticed five common afflictions that affect sales teams—each reducing
morale and sales performance. They can be found to some degree in most almost
every organisation. Smart HR managers are aware of these afflictions and work to
avoid their potentially destructive impact. Any one occurrence of these problems
will not necessary harm sales efforts, but if allowed to progress to extremes, or if
multiple conditions exist at once, they can prove extremely harmful.
Affliction 1: wasting sales
representatives’ time One of the prime afflictions of sales teams
is forcing them to spend time on nonsales tasks, for example making account
receivable collections, managing product recalls or filling out reports that do not
directly relate to the sales process. ‘Nonsales’ management often requests that reps
perform these tasks, but great care should be taken before delegating them to valuable
salespeople. 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 salespeople, but before this is done it’s worthwhile to audit your sales processes
to determine whether they might be better 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 salesperson who attends a meeting will be thinking,
“Is this meeting making me money, or is my time being wasted?” Powerful
salespeople 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 salesperson 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 that 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 welldefined
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 it’s not
that simple. The sales team will recognise ineffective strategy and will lose faith in the
managers who developed it. If the players on a sports team lose faith in the coaching,
the path to winning will be difficult, if not impossible; the same is true with sales
teams. Don’t let lackluster or nonexistent strategy cause this lack of faith.
To compound the error, companies often try special promotions to save sagging
sales on products that are ill-conceived or supported by poor strategy. Special
promotions can be very effective, but managers should never call for a pointlesscharge of the light brigade. Sending the sales team on a promotion in support of a poor product or service is a severe tactical error. A successful sales effort hinges on good strategy, and companies that fail in this
regard severely handicap their sales teams.
Affliction 4: capping or reducing income
Powerful companies have managers who do not get envious when large pay cheques
go to the sales force. Managers who are resentful of this often respond to rising sales
income by reducing commissions, capping earnings, reducing territories, or removing
products. These are all practices to be avoided, as they destroy morale, which hurts
sales. When it is absolutely necessary to cap or reduce reps’ earnings, it must be done
carefully. If it’s done carelessly, management will send the message that future earnings
for the sales team have been limited. Powerful salespeople want to leverage
today’s efforts into greater sales and income for tomorrow. If their commissions
are reduced, earnings capped, or territory removed, they will feel like that ability has
been taken away, and the high performers will quickly look for employment elsewhere.
Affliction 5: favouritism
We all have favourites in life and that’s normal, but playing favourites with
individuals on a sales team is very destructive. Salespeople want to work for
companies that keep the playing field leve for all. If select salespeople are given extra
incentives, special attention, benefits, or favours not afforded others, management
is sending a clear message that there is a privileged class within the team. This is one
of the best ways to lessen team spirit, as reps will spend their time trying to move
into that special class and not trying to close sales. Managers can’t buy the loyalty
of a team by strengthening a small political power base within a company. Playing
favourites within a sales team causes problems for all team members (even the
favoured ones), but keeping the playing field level will pay big dividends.
Wasting time, poor sales meetings, poor strategy, capping income, and playing
favourites are, with few exceptions, situations to be avoided. They are
destructive to morale and they lead to poor performance. Effective managers will be
careful to avoid these situations, and astute salespeople will bring these practices to the
attention of management for correction.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
