Dear Lucky,
You could have given complete information. Are you student or professional? If latter, then what is your designation? What is the nature of your industry? What is your finished product or service? How many sales managers report to the Area Sales Manager (ASM)? What is the geographical spread of the customers? Is the product exported also? What is the involvement of wholesalers or retailers in the sale of your product? Delivery of the finished product also depends on the timely procurement of the raw material. Therefore, where suppliers of the raw material are located? Do you have overseas suppliers?
If you are from service industry, then different parameters come in picture.
Replies to these questions are necessary as productivity would differ from one industry to another. For example, though steel manufacturing company and garment manufacturing company both belong to the "manufacturing" category, their dynamics is different.
Going further, have you trained your salespersons? If given a chance to handle particular sales call, will the sales call be handled exactly in the same fashion by 10 salespersons? I ask this question because to improve the productivity, you need to have a well-researched,
customisedsales process. Training should be conducted on this formal sales process.
How the salespersons maintain the records of their sales call? I mean to say, have you designed a formal "Sales Call Evaluation Sheet"? If yes, have you done study of these sheets? If yes, then could you draw specific pattern in the category sale?
Do you have marketing department? What inputs do they provide to the sales department? Do you study your competitors? If yes, then how? Do you have budgetary allocations for the "Market Research"? What is the brand image of your company in the market? What market share do you have? How many inbound queries do you get from your customers for the purchase of your product?
What is the attrition rate of salespersons in your company? How do you recruit your salespersons? What are the recruitment standards? Have you trained the staff who are involved in recruitment in "Interview Handling Skills"?
How often top management personnel accompany salespersons for the sales call? How top management records their observations on the quality of the sales call?
Has the product been designed after sufficient market research? Has the product been copied from the competitors? What is the quality of the product? What is the product failure rate? Do the salespersons have complete faith of the product? If yes, then how do you asses it? Do you have after sales service department? How do measure the turnaround time for the technical fault?
There are so many questions gentleman/gentlewoman. Productivity is complex issue. It cannot be generalised in just 1-2 points.
I ask these questions because I conduct the training on "
Effective Selling Skills". Click on the hyperlink to know more about it.
Thanks,
Dinesh Divekar
Bangalore - 560092
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.