A Sales Force to be Reckoned With

Is your sales force the right size and in the right places? A sales group’s most critical resource is the time available for face-to-face sales calls. If your team is bogged down in administrative details or stymied by cost-reduction efforts, you may need to take another look at how to make them more efficient.

Begin by considering the size of your sales force. Don’t focus on the dollar amount you want each member to earn. Instead, look at how many calls you want each to make.

Multiply your total accounts by the number of times they need to be called on each year and then divide that total by the number of calls a sales rep can make during a year. For example, let’s say you want your sales reps to make 21 calls on each of 300 accounts in a year — 6,300 calls total. If each salesperson can make five calls per day, or about 1,260 calls per year, you’ll need five sales reps to achieve that goal.

In addition, take into account historical performance data and allow for calls to prospects as well as potential shifts in markets and customer bases. The result should give you an estimate of how large your sales team should be.

Then determine how to best deploy them. How’s your sales force currently deployed? If there are workload inequities, significant changes in market potential or imbalances in sales rep experiences, your first goal is to correct those problems. If changing demographics have turned a previously low-opportunity area into a hot spot, for example, the rookie sales rep currently deployed there probably needs help.

Depending on what you find in assessing your current sales force deployment, you may want to realign your territories, transfer sales personnel to territories where they can use their skills to better advantage, or increase or decrease the staff.

But do so carefully and after cautious consideration. If you’re committed to matching territory opportunity and size to sales rep capabilities and experience, you can end up with a more efficient and effective team that operates to your best advantage.

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