Imagine that you would now save 30 to 40 percent of your overhead costs in sales without doing anything to your sales turnover – whether existing or new – to your disadvantage, on the contrary: This would even become significant increase. To be too good to be true? Extremely difficult to implement? Are these the thoughts that are coming up to you now? The answer is: no! Neither applies!
You have probably heard of the film 300 or maybe even seen it. It is about how a 300-strong, very brave Greek force faces its Persian opponent, who leads an army against them with an overwhelming number. And yet the Greeks win the battle.
Nowadays, sales organizations are facing a similar task: it is important to achieve the greatest possible customer turnover with a high-performing team and to beat the far larger competitor – continuously and permanently.
The five success factors for this are
1. sales management,
2. an excellent and continuous training program,
3. a suitably tailored incentive system and
4. a high intrinsic motivation of all sales people.
2. an excellent and continuous training program,
3. a suitably tailored incentive system and
4. a high intrinsic motivation of all sales people.
And the fifth reason?
In most companies, however, it is the case that at least three of these four factors are not or only insufficiently taken into account or implemented. In addition, there is often a fifth factor, namely the team size, which is often incorrectly dimensioned. In many companies, the team is either too large, or the number of salespeople who only achieve average or even below-average results is three to four times as high as the number of those who achieve a real return on sales of double or triple their own costs (cost to Company).
The Pareto principle
We have already shown in numerous publications how the Pareto principle can be applied to many sales areas and leads to higher sales at lower costs.
Applied to team performance, it can be seen that there is a strong imbalance in the distribution of performance in almost all sales organizations: 20 percent of sales employees generate 80 percent of sales revenue or more. Conversely, does that mean that 80 percent of sales people don’t do their jobs?