Sales Force Effectiveness

Overview

Improving Sales Force Effectiveness can have a dramatic impact on an organization’s revenue growth and relative market share. At Callidon we take a highly analytical approach to diagnosing the barriers to sales force performance and implementing improvement strategies. Our approach typically focuses on issues such as optimizing sales rep coverage levels, mix of telephone / field / online sales, mix of new sales versus existing account management, breadth of product bag, and overall rep productivity.

Strategic Challenges

Most organizations seeking to improve sales force effectiveness focus almost exclusively on improving the sales skills of their reps—either through new hiring or through extensive training programs. While this approach can be highly effective, it overlooks more fundamental barriers that, regardless of the quality of the reps, may be reducing the effectiveness of field sales force. For example:

  • Do you have the optimum territory size (i.e. coverage levels)?
  • Is the product bag too broad to allow reps to effectively promote all the products?
  • Do you have adequate lead generation programs?
  • Do you have the optimum mix between field, telephone and online sales?
  • Are your reps striking the right balance with their time between servicing / up selling existing accounts versus prospecting for new accounts?

At Callidon we work closely with Sales Management to identify improvement opportunities through rigorous analysis. Moreover, we have deep experience assisting with the implementation of our recommendations. We take a pragmatic approach, recognizing the importance of balancing the powerful and rapid benefits of sales force optimization, with the need to avoid major disruptions to the sales effort.

Activities

  • Modeling impact of territory size on territory market share determine optimum coverage levels
  • Analyzing relative effectiveness (i.e. return on sales investment) of telephone and online sales for various products and account types
  • Assessing performance of sales force in promoting and selling each major product in the product bag versus the product penetration opportunity
  • Analyzing and benchmarking rep productivity and drivers of variation
  • Comparing rep activities with revenue growth opportunities