Definition

Sales effectiveness is the ability of a company’s sales representative to navigate through the sales procedure with the customer and get a positive or desired outcome at every stage. It describes a category of technologies and tools used by a company to improve its sales. An effective salesperson helps the company get exactly what it wants and more as well as helping in drumming up sales. Sales effectiveness also involves getting not just the tactics right; but also the time frame.

Companies are always working to improve their sales effectiveness and this requires the collaboration of both the sales department and the marketing department so as to understand what works and what doesn’t. Strategies used by the sales representatives as they pursue leads are also investigated and changed accordingly.

Sales effectiveness is determined by the sale force performance. Sales managers, therefore, examine sale force performance and make needed variations to enhance the sales process. The performance thereafter can be calculated for individuals as well as for the whole workforce. “Salesforce effectiveness” metric has been proven to be very useful.

Purpose of sales effectiveness

The basic purpose of sales effectiveness is to increase the business’s revenue by improving and increasing customer acquisition, sales of commodities (both products and services) as well as up-selling and cross-selling extra commodities. Sales effectiveness metric serves to measure the sales performance of persons and the group as a whole. A number of metrics can be used to gauge the performance of a salesperson so as to reveal information that just the mere total number of sales can’t show. Increase in revenue per sales representatives shows an improvement in the sales effectiveness.

Methodology for evaluating sales effectiveness

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the most accomplished method for evaluating how effective a company’s sales team is. Surveys done have shown that sales performance is enhanced by a well defined sales process.

Various benchmarking surveys have led to the realization of 5 groups of people in a sales team. They include:

  • Believers – these are the perfect sales people as they not only adhere to the set sales process, they also believe in its power
  • Compliants – this group consist of employees who follow the process as laid down but don’t necessarily believe in it.
  • Mavericks – Mavericks are almost like deviants as they recognize the sales process laid down but they choose to follow processes of their own making.
  • The self-reliant and the clueless – both these groups are unaware of the laid out sales process but unlike the clueless ones, the self-reliant try to work one out.