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.

This is a quick and easy way to assess whether you need to work on improving your sales reps’ skills or whether you simply need to improve the effort level.

Simply collect this data for each sales person:

• Monthly sales

• Monthly sales calls quantity.

With this you simply plot all your sales reps on a chart to see how they all perform.

For instance let’s say you plot your chart and you see this pattern:

SKILLS MORE IMPORTANT 

Two things are very clear:

1. There are a few high performers on the upper left of the chart and they are making fewer sales calls than most of the sales team. 
2. The under-permforming sales people are found towards the right of the chart. These people are putting in a lot of effort making calls but they are not making as much revenue as the high performers.

This is indicates that your high performers have greater skills and are doing something very different than the rest of your team once they meet the customer.  They engage in fewer calls but they make each call much more productive.

The reps at the right of the chart are obviously working very hard.  Effort is not an issue because they clearly make a lot of sales calls.  But those calls are producing low results.
If you are a sales manager, this is your sales team screaming "We need training". Investing in sales training here will get you good results.

However, you may actually plot your data and see this pattern:

 EFFORT MORE IMPORTANT

  

In this chart it’s very clear that the more sales calls your reps make, the greater their sales. Unlike the first example, this team indicates a high call rate is directly proportional to higher sales.  (this pattern is typically seen in transactional sales with intrinsic need buyers which was covered in this post on strategy)

In this case it would be much more effective to place incentives to increase the sales call activity rather than to engage in sales training.  Here is an example from a CGTA sales team that produced results similar to the second chart.  These sales agents were offered financial incentives to increase their activity.  They produced outstanding results as you will see if you read the linked post.

Your sales team is an important asset.   Make sure you take the time to understand the real issues affecting their performance.  Picking the right training and incentives are the difference between wasting money and making sales.

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