I’m often asked how to restructure a sales team to make them more profitable faster and how to identify and avoid recruiting order takers that eat up valuable management time.
So here’s a video I’ve uploaded on the topic and hope you find it useful

Hiring salespeople, avoiding ordertakers

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking to a couple of businesses about restructuring their sales teams. The intention is to expand their profitability by increasing the productivity of the personnel.

Major problem
A major problem with sales team development is the acceptance of the 80/20 rule. This is where management believe that 80% of sales will always come from 20% of the team and are happy to accept that situation. The problem comes when part of the top 20% decide to leave for another job! At that stage panic usually set-in amongst the sales management.

Possible reason
The possible reason for the above is that in good times the recruitment process allowed ordertakers to gain sales jobs quite easily. Personnel are hired to fill posts without investigating if the individual’s past sales results were due to personal drive, capability and whether the skills are able to be easily replicated in another company, product and territory. However, in these economic times a business can’t afford to be hiring order-takers when they really need capable salespeople.

New videos
To overcome the problem of hiring order-takers I’ve been asked to make a couple of short videos on this topic and these start filming towards the end of this week.
If you would like to be sent an email when they are uploaded onto YouTube then simply register as a subscriber on my YouTube channel @ stephenharvarddavis 
or send me an email at Stephen@assimilating-talent.com

This past week I’ve spent with friends and our after dinner discussion was the state of the economies of Europe and the affects of the high street. Economic problems and affecting sales at HMV, Waterstones, Thornton’s chocolates, Comet and so on and the impact is felt further down the supply chain.

Strikes by National Union of Teachers and Public Services Unions as well as others create further downturn in sales as confidence in the future falls. My friends are mostly owners of small businesses and discussions focussed on how to reduce the effects of strikes and falling confidence on sales.

Restructuring sales teams
When sales fall most businesses cut out unnecessary expenditure and restructure the sales and marketing team. Often this means reducing the size of the team but one friend of mine has actually increased the size of his team and has increased sales. We had worked on the plan together and so I’m delighted by his success and he expressed enthusiasm for thee video below that helped him consider the salesperson he was looking for.

Sales and Marketing interview questions