Actions and behaviors matter too. The actions that your sales team take this quarter will determine the team’s success for the rest of the year, and probably far longer than that. Some actions drive immediate sales while others are more like planting seeds where it may take some time before they bear fruit. Figuring out which actions are best to drive short-term and long-term results isn’t easy and requires tracking the activities that your reps are performing and measuring the results.

To give you inspiration, here are some ideas on things to measure, based on things we’ve seen some of our best performing clients measure:

• Number of customer visits per week or per month.
• Total number of hours per week or per month in the field visiting customers and prospects.
• Number of prospective customer visits per month or per quarter.
• Number of in-store promotions attended per month or per quarter.
• Number of customers that the rep updated point of sale for per week or per quarter.
• Number of times the rep’s customers called customer service.
• Percentage of returns.
• Number or percentage of neglected customers (those that haven’t been visited within the desired call frequency).
• Number or percentage of dormant customers (those that haven’t placed an order within a given time frame).

If you’ve got other examples of things that you measure, please add them to the comments.

1. How many hours per month do your salespeople spend in the office on administrative tasks?

2. In an ideal world, how many hours would you like them to spend on these tasks?

3. What is the value to the organization if you can achieve this reduction? This value may be expressed in terms of additional sales visits per month, additional orders taken, ability to handle more accounts without adding staff, etc.

4. What is preventing you from achieving this?

In many cases, technology can give you the results you are looking to achieve. I have personally witnessed some dramatic increases in field time and major reductions in hours spent in the office working on administrative tasks. For example, the Virginia Lottery’s sales reps spent at least one full day per week in the office before implementing OrderPad; today, they spend one day per month. This means that the average sales rep now spends an additional seven weeks per year in the field visiting customers, taking orders, and merchandising their products; the equivalent of adding a new full time sales person for each seven they currently had on staff. In another case, the number of days per month in the office was cut from six days to one, adding about 12 weeks in the field per sales rep.

The last question you should ask yourself is “What am I waiting for?”
 

OrderPad was inspired by the Tablet PC platform and was designed to take full advantage of its unique capabilities.Today, thousands of salespeople use OrderPad all day without ever touching a keyboard to enter orders, view rich customer data, access product information, record their visit histories, and manage their to do lists. But, there are also people in sales management, marketing, customer service, and other business functions that sit at a desk all day and use a desktop PC or standard notebook computer - and OrderPad works great on those too.

As a general rule, Tablet PC’s have much larger screens than PDA’s which translates into more pixels being displayed. This allows us to present more information on the screen at one time which reduces the need for “Next” and “Previous”. It also allows us to use a portion of the screen for far easier navigation than a PDA would allow, which meant that the need for “Next” and “Previous” could be eliminated.

The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Do your customers know how much they need to order?”
Him: “Sometimes.”
Me: “So, sometimes they ask you for advice? They might ask you how much they ordered of a similar product last month or last quarter, is that right?”
Him: “Yup.”
Me: “Are you able to answer that question for them quickly?”
Him: “Yeah, real quickly. I tell them ‘Hell if I know.’”

I waited for him to laugh and tell me he was joking, but unfortunately (for him and the company that employed him), he wasn’t. I then asked what it would take to get that information and he told me he could run some reports in the office and perform some basic arithmetic, but he really didn’t have time to do all that and make all the customer calls he was supposed to make.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking – big deal, you spoke to a really bad sales rep. Perhaps. Let’s assume that is the case. That isn’t the point. Let’s assume a good sales rep would take the time to do the homework. Now what you’ve done is take a good sales rep out of the field to run analysis rather than meet with their customers – which reduces the time where they can really add value to their customers. You see where I’m going with this? For a sales rep, the value isn’t in running the analysis on the data; it’s in explaining the analysis to your customers. After all, that’s where the data (at the customer level) is truly actionable.

I did speak with other reps at the company and the fact is, the company provided their sales reps with some tools, but in many cases they were the wrong ones (for example the reports he spoke of where he would still need to do some work to give the customer the answer). What are the right tools you ask? The answer is simple, they are the ones that will make your sales reps more effective and more efficient. To borrow a theme from Stephen Covey, the tools should make them more effective when dealing with people and more efficient when dealing with paperwork. Of course, it could be a really cool tool like OrderPad, but in this case maybe a better report from their existing systems would have done the trick.

Oh, and back to the “Hell if I know” – he’d better hope his competitors don’t know either.

“The mistake most blogs and books make: they are about the writer, not the reader.”

A few weeks earlier, Jason Fried of 37 Signals said:

“Most copywriting on the web sucks because it’s written for the writer, not for the reader. Write for the reader. That is all.”

Both observations were simple, obvious, and profound – and have a clear parallel to sales. The salesperson that empathizes with the customer and the customer’s needs (along with their goals, hopes, and desires) will almost always win (especially in the long term).

For those of you not familiar with Electric Pulp, they are a small web development firm from South Dakota, brought to recent fame by Guy Kawasaki and his infamous ARSE test (I’m happy to report that I scored fairly low). Guy also hired them to build Truemors, the worst website ever, and said this about them, “Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.” We agree wholeheartedly.