¶ … Control of Sales Performance: Aspen Athletic Clubs of Iowa
Critically important to sales planning and control strategies is to first get those most affected by the program to participate within it. Overcoming resistance to change of the sales teams is consistently the greatest challenge in implementing effective evaluation and control systems, measures of performance, and benchmarks (van Dijk, van Dick, 2009). As the Aspen Athletic Clubs of Iowa are a highly service-centric business who offer fitness, short-term, corporate memberships and additional services, the need for defining evaluation and control measures of performance that are seen as relevant to the sales team is critical. In conjunction with this is the need to define levels of performance for each of the key performance indicators (KPIs) chosen to be included in benchmarking performance. What is critically important is to include metrics that measure the progression of a prospect to becoming a client, and from a client, to a loyal customer (Klassen, Russell, Chrisman, 1998). This is often called creating a sales channel funnel analysis (Lidstone, 1990) and is very useful for analyzing which strategies move customers from being interested to actually trying the service. What is critically important in creating a balanced scorecard for high services businesses such as the Aspen Athletic Club of Iowa is a strong focus on measuring collaboration over time, as contracts are sold through team efforts usually (Lidstone, 1990). One the key performance indicators are included in the balance scorecard, sales managers often will evaluate performance in a periodic basis. The extent to which the sales team identifies with an internalizes their goals is the extent to which control of sales performance will be effective over time.
References
Kenneth J. Klassen, Randolph M. Russell, & James J. Chrisman. (1998). Efficiency and productivity measures for high contact services. The Service Industries Journal, 18(4), 1-18.
Lidstone, John. (1990). How to Plan the Sales Operation. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 8(4), S1.
van Dijk, R., & van Dick, R.. (2009). Navigating Organizational Change: Change Leaders, Employee Resistance and Work-based Identities. Journal of Change Management, 9(2), 143.
