Methods To Control Sales Performance
It is important to control the sales performance of salesforce/sales personnel when it needs to. It is obvious that there will be fluctuations in the performance of salespeople when time passes as many factors affect them.
It is a prime duty of the sales manager/selling firm to continuously evaluate, monitor, and control their sales personnel’s performance in order to achieve desired sales objectives.
There are various methods for controlling the sales performance that a sales manager can go for. Here are the most relevant and practiced methods to control sales performance, mentioned.
Sales Control
When monitoring and evaluating sales, the company looks at not only the overall volume of sales, but also the micro-scales, which are heavily influenced by individual product sales, sales of a specific category, area, or customer group.
Because the failure to meet sales targets accounts for the majority of sales variance, the company must investigate why its objective was not met. After determining the cause, four different adjustment strategies are used to close the gap between desired and actual performance – setting sales performance standards, getting the actual performance, comparing it with the standards, and controlling the performance.
Sales Expenses to Sales Control
This sales performance control method determines the relative profitability of various areas and products/product lines. It assists the organization in ensuring that it is not overspending in order to meet its sales targets.
In other words, when the sales force advertising, sales promotion, sales research, and sales administration budgets deviate, the budgetary objective achievement is examined for control purposes.
As a result, sales expenditure analysis is the study of differences between anticipated sales costs and actual spending incurred in order to increase sales.
The company may use a control chart in order to analyze the budgetary expenses. In the control chart, three lines are drawn. The middle line shows the desired level of expenses, the upper line determines the maximum limit of expenses, and the lower line shows the minimum level of expenses.
If the company maintains the desired level of expenses, it has good control over sales expenses. If it is maintained at the upper or lower limit, it is at the acceptance level of expenses. But if it exceeds the upper limit or lower limit, it is deviating from the desired expenses. Hence, the second and the third occurrence lead the company to check actually where the expenses went wrong.
Customer Satisfaction Track
It is the most qualitative method of sales control, especially for measuring the attitudes and satisfaction of customers, dealers, and other sales units. If the organization does not achieve the intended results from these challenges, it must change the degree of customer referrals and happiness before sales suffer.
For this, the corporation can use a variety of effective strategies, including resolving customer concerns and providing solutions, agreeing with customers to share essential information on a regular basis, and conducting customer surveys.
Customers’ true demands for products and services should be determined, and the organization should make every attempt to meet those needs.
Salesforce Efficiency Control
Salesforce efficiency is an important aspect of generating sales and profits. But measuring and controlling this efficiency is a complex task because it includes a series of measurements. Most of them are:
- Ascertaining percentage of orders per one hundred sales calls,
- Determining an average number of sales calls per salesperson per day,
- Analyzing sales force costs as the percentage of total sales,
- Determining average sales call time per contact,
- Analyzing entertainment cost per sales call, and research costs,
- Determining the number of customers during a specified period of time,
- Obtaining the list of the number of new customers during a specified period of time.
Market Audit
A market audit is a comprehensive, systematic, independent, and periodic examination of the market environment, market plans implemented, territorial performance, and implemented a system of sales organization units.
With respect to evaluating/auditing the market environment, the major trends (megatrends) are determined so that the sales units can apply their efforts to adjust accordingly. Similarly, the company evaluates previously implemented sales strategies and plans, and whether they are properly working.
If not, corrective action is taken. Territorial performance is audited by ascertaining whether the sales system is working well and whether sales units’ personnel are effectively resulting in their performance. If not, the earlier explained corrective options are suggestive to go for.