Sales management strategies for motivating field salespeople

Sales Management: Strategies

Customers are motivated to buy a company's product when a company's sales staff is motivated by the correct managerial techniques. But what strategies can sales managers use to properly motivate and manage salespeople in the field? Bluntly, a sales consultant grouses when "left to their own devices, most salespeople will work less than 40 hours a week. This demands that sales management devote a significant amount of time to specifying, monitoring and controlling the daily activities of subordinates." (Gorelick, 2004) Three popular ways of doing such monitoring and motivating in the most effective ways possible are encouraging sales staff to target specific clients, rather than extend a wide reach of cold calls (also known as the time management stratgey), stressing solutions to specific customer problems and generating demand by highlighting specific customer problems, and by establishing sales employee incentives on long-term performance rather than short-term sales.

Saving Time by Segmenting the Market

Mark Hendricks in Entrepreneur magazine recently noted the increased popularity of 'time management' sales strategies in a less sales-friendly market. Using segmented and targeted research while deploying salespeople stragetically, hiring more of salepeople in general to target different market segments, "and investing more in training, supervision and technology to support sales," is now a popular managerial technique. This 'time management' strategy, or time compression, was born of an economic enviroronment boasting "savvier but less patient customers" and "the availability of more but sometimes less qualified candidates for sales jobs." (Hendricks, 2002, p.1) for instance, phamecutical companies like Pfizer now often have more drug representatives with fewer drugs under their care, and specific staff that highlight doctor's offices, while other salespeople market different products or different doses of drugs or sales packages to hospitals.

This stress on time management sales means targeted and focused objectives and directives. It means salespeole cannot waste prospects' time with "chitchat." Today's sucessful salespeople can not look for "easy, quick closes. They're not cold-calling. They're not selling solely on price. They're not just peddling products and services. and, above all, they're not waiting one minute for buyers to come to them." (Hendricks, 2002, p.1)

Motivating the Staff on a Long-Term Basis

Things have changed in terms of motivating by commission salaries. "The good news about paying salespeople today is that you can peg a higher percentage of compensation to performance. Entrepreneurs today are having less trouble keeping good people and hiring new ones at lower base salaries than in years past. But they are also finding less justification for paying straight commissions for new orders. Instead, they're basing compensation on more exotic, harder-to-figure measures such as profit margin per order and customer satisfaction. The revised approaches do more than save money, although total sales pay may actually be shrinking from previously inflated levels. Most important, they make sure salespeople aren't making the wrong sales. Paying based on profit margin keeps sellers from cutting prices just to get an order. And basing pay on customer satisfaction means salespeople won't promise features and delivery dates the company can't provide. (Hendricks, 2002, p.2)

Incentive programs can be tricky beasts. What motivates one salesperson may completely discourage another." (McCall, 2001) but whether one uses cash, perks, or luxurious promotions, make sure to motivate the correct behavior. "Flextime, overtime and four-day weekends don't work as incentives in small companies," says one manager from a small magazine marketing firm, although she states they have been spectacularly sucessful in larger Fortune 500 companies. "You can't develop energy when employees aren't there when you need them." (McCall, 2001) but what is critical is that a sales person's long-term client cultivation, rather than making the occasional 'big killing' recieves the greatest reward, as this is what is ultimately most beneficial for the company's bottom line.