Dear Jasneet,
Sales happens with patience. It requires aggressive follow up. Going further, you have not mentioned the nature of your industry, type of product, whether B2B product or B2C product, whether direct or indirect sale etc. For few type of sales, the sales cycle time is too long. Therefore, do you know what is the average sales cycle time for the various products sold by your company?
How many years old your company? All of the sales calls put together, how many sales calls are handled per day, week or month? Have you found out what is cold calls to hot calls ratio, what is hot calls to quotation ratio and what is quotation to acquisition of PO ratio? Has anybody done analysis of the success or failure of the sales call? Have you generated inventory of the errors made while handling the sales call? What steps do you take to avoid repetition of the mistake by the same salesperson or some other salesperson?
Sales success also depends on ability of the company in bringing uniformity in the way sales calls are handled. Irrespective of the type of customer, 10 or even 100 salespersons should handle the sales call exactly in same fashion? Do you have this uniform approach or individualistic approach?
To succeed in sales, lot of research of the sales calls is required. Sales success depends on the knowledge infrastructure the company creates. What infrastructure have you created so as to reduce dependence on the salespersons? I ask these questions because I conduct training programme on
Effective Selling Skills. Click on the hyperlink to know the details of the programme.
Salary deduction or removal of salesperson because of "under-performance" is easy. Attrition of the sales force creates instability in the sales department. it fosters demotivation also. Have you measured cost of this demotivation?
Lastly, your query has been answered in my previous reply. Irrespective of the failure at field by the salespersons, your company is ought to pay minimum wages to the salesperson or sales manager. Your company could have shown foresight and devised the salary structure accordingly. No there is no point in crying over spilt milk! Partially it could be your recruitment mistake also!
Thanks,
Dinesh Divekar