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Check out your Capacity

There are 260 weekdays in a year.

Let’s work an example. If you allow:

• 25 days for holidays
• 8 days for public holidays
• 8 days for sickness
• 30 days for training and meetings ...

You arrive at 189 selling days.

But most salespeople are not out selling all day, every day. They have other things to do in the office.

It’s reasonable to allow three hours per day office time for planning, administration, research and other non-selling activities. This leaves five hours per day active selling time.

Five hours per selling day equates to 945 selling hours per year out of 1,512 total hours (189 x 8).

If face-to-face visits average two hours and involve 1½ hours’ travel, and telephone contacts average ½ hour, your achievable contacts in a day are:

• Ten by phone, or
• One face-to-face and three by phone.

You never have an average day, but overall this is how it works out on the above assumptions.

You never employ an average salesperson either, but on average, salespeople close one in three deals. Out of the 945 selling hours available per year 630 are spent losing deals!

 

So what’s left?

On the above assumptions – 315 productive selling hours per year – 33% of a salesperson’s available selling time.

This is just under 21% of a salesperson’s total hours.

 

Salespeople, on average, are selling successfully for just one day per working week!

 

And what can you do about it?

Improve operational efficiency:

• Reduce or eliminate non-productive face-to-face time
• Use other channels to offload “low value” selling tasks
• Move necessary non-selling tasks to admin or sales support
• Simplify and automate non-selling tasks wherever possible
• Implement salesforce automation.

Improve operational effectiveness:

• Increase focus – industry or sector
• Focus on large decision making units, qualify out the difficult sales – go for the “big and easy”
• Maximise existing account development
• Review, improve and reinforce your selling process
• Improve your salesforce’s skills and knowledge

Build a salesforce productivity route map and put measures in place:

• Increase contact hours
  – contact time % of total hours
• Increase selling hours
  – selling time % of total hours
• Increase number of selling cycles
  – number of selling cycles
• Increase number of negotiation hours
  – negotiation time % of total hours
• Increase the speed of selling cycles
  – prospecting and negotiation time per sale
• Increase the value of selling cycles
  – revenue per sale
• Improve your hit rate
  – sales % of selling cycles
• Keep your records current and up to date
  – number of records up to date.

 

What else can you do about it?

There’s much more that you can do. The above suggestions are just the start point.

Effectively doubling salesforce productivity is often a very realistic objective – with a huge business benefit.

 

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If you now believe that you can effectively double your salesforce’s productivity and would like our help to achieve it:

 

Call us on 0845 125 9098

 

Or click here to complete the contact form