Sales reps: More skills or more effort – how to test

Sales teams are our most important asset.    And like any job, selling takes a combination of skill and effort.

So should you invest in skill development or should you focus on increasing their effort?

It’s an important question, because which ever path you take, either training to improve skills or incentives to increase effort, you will be spending money.  And you don’t want to waste it; you want a real return on your investment.

Incentive programs will be a failure if your sales team doesn’t have the right skills.  The opportunity to earn more money doesn’t magically make you more skilful. 

And spending on skill development will be completely wasted if the real problem is that sales people are simply not putting in the right effort.    

It’s actually very simple to determine if you have a skill problem or an effort problem.   Read on and learn how to do a simple test for skills vs effort.

MOTIVATION: WINNING BONUS PLANS…and why some waste your money

0ver 450 orders by 10 sales agents in 10 weeks.  Results like this require a skillful sales team...and the right incentive program.

The chart on the right shows how one sales team responded very differently depending on the incentive program.

One incentive program produced 60% better results...that's sales to 200 more stores...compared to the weaker incentive program.

Read on...to learn why one bonus program was wildly successful and one simply wasted money.

TRENDS: CAN YOU SPOT THEM?

Trends are an important part of our industry.  And "Market Pulse" published by the CGTA is a great source to understand sales trends.  But you need to know how to interpret it.  We’ll show you how in this blog.  

All vendors face long production lead times (4 to 6 months), so they simply can’t spot a
trend today and then have it ready for delivery tomorrow.   They need to anticipate trends.   

Consequently wholesalers have no choice but to take a guess about the future.  And basically what they need to do is determine whether a category is growing or declining.

 

If a wholesaler anticipates that fewer retailers are purchasing a product category, they will produce fewer products.  No one wants to be stuck with inventory and few potential customers.

On the other hand, if a wholesaler senses the number of retailers interested in a category is growing it may produce more merchandise in anticipation of higher demand. You don’t want to miss out on sales.

The ability to identify trends is important...lots of money is at stake.  How do you predict growing or declining categories?