I’ve been asked to explain how to assess the efficiency of a sales tean

This is quite a complicated area but in just a few steps here’s my method

a) Work out no’s that exceed target and % of excess
b) Work out no’s that don’t meet target and %
c) If more people in sales team exceed target then it’s about right or understated
d) If more people are below target then either target is too high or there are too many passengers.

This is a very simple formula and much has been left out by I hope you get the idea

I had an interesting Skype conversation with a friend of mine in California last night who has just taken over a new sales team after the departure of the previous Sales Manager.

First stage
I asked him about the indicators that told people that things were “going wrong” before the departure of his predecessor. The process began, he said, with the Sales Team saying things like “It’s just not working” but being unable to agree on exactly what “It” was.

The second stage
was people outside the team saying things such as, “The sales team’s sucking in loads of our time”, “the restructure’s not working” and “We’re not going to meet target”

Third stage
Was when senior management started to get involved. This was about four months after stage one. It then took another six months for the sales manager to be dismissed. Total time when opportunities were lost amounted to ten months and further delay is likely to occur before the new manager gets a grip on the situation.

Result and main reason
Estimated lost income is hundreds of thousands of dollars!
One of the main reasons for the failure, and one that is so common, was that The Sales Director felt unsupported by the senior management and the sales Director was not willing to say that he “was struggling”. 

It’s tragic that at the start of the summer, nearly one million 16 to 24-year-olds in England were out of a job, not in education, nor in training. Known as Neets, this group seems to be growing and growing and doesn’t include school leavers this year, according to the latest official figures and reported by the BBC.

The BBC highlights Jordan Millward a 24 year old from Stoke-on-Trent who has two degrees, a 2:1 in politics, and a 2:2 in law, as well as a post-graduate law diploma.
He says “I’ve had no replies to more than 100 applications to different law firms looking for both jobs and work experience I’ve made over the last year, and only two interviews from the 90 plus applications I’ve made over the last two months”.

Little advice from Universities
Why is finding a job so difficult for this group? In discussions with students at my local University it seems that there is very little practical advice is given on how to find a job. I’m told that there is the “odd talk” about developing a CV (Resume) but very little else! Doesn’t this place too many in the area of “working it out for themselves”.

More practical help could and should be given! For instance, why is it that most students know how to use social media to find friends and entertainment at the weekend but they find it difficult to use when looking for a job? Why is it that so few place their details, qualifications and interests on the business pages of LinkedIn, Facebook or other SM sites?

Meet the employer
Perhaps organisations such as the IOD (Institute of Directors), Chambers of Commerce, FSB (Federation of Small business) could help more by regularly offering FREE places at their events for graduates or students to meet people in business and thus potential employers.

A small contribution of my own is given below:

Questions you should ask the interviewer

I do hate it when business use phrases to hide actions in order to reduce the potential impact and effects and one that I find increasingly annoying is “Rightsizing”. This is partly because it’s so often used to replace more accurate descriptions such as Redundancy.

It was used in Management Today “UBS is far from being the only bank which has announced
job cuts recently – everyone from HSBC to Credit Suisse has been busy
‘rightsizing’ their workforces…The job cuts at UBS amount to over 5% of its total workforce “.

Now, I know that “Rightsizing” has been used for some years but surely it’s poor management to have “Wrongsized” in the first place (see Tony Miller descriptions below) but I doubt that it’s the management jobs that are about to be rightsized! You can imagine the  press release from UBS HR was at pains to seem to be “normalizing” the situation but is the term “Rightsizing” the correct one.
 
Thanks to Tony Miller  for giving a reasonable explanation so that we can all make up our own mind!:

Downsizing
Is simply reducing the number of reporting layers in the business to produce a better line of communication and efficiency…Downsizing is a stressful and risky business and should not be carried out by anyone who has not experienced this technique.

Rightsizing
Involves reducing the organisation by a small percentage. By doing this you can keep the organisation trim and in better condition. It can be achieved by a number of painless means such as:
Freezing recruitment
Releasing the long-term sick
Releasing poor performers

I was interested to read that the future of the government’s Work Programme “hangs in the balance” as research has revealed that 90 per cent of contracted Work Programme providers will miss their targets to get people back into work.

“The future of this vital employment scheme hangs in the balance,” said Ian Mulheirn, Director of the SMF.  “The programme aims to get some of the hardest to reach people off benefits and into work, but past performance shows that providers will be unable to meet the criteria required of them by the DWP”. As reported in Management Today

The statistic raises a number of questions:

• Were the targets too high?
• Were the providers promising too much in their application for the contract?
• Were the providers competent?
• Is the economic downturn so deep that it makes delivery impossible?
• Are employers just not employing?
  

No doubt the answers, arguments and “justification” will depend upon being in Government, Providers or DWP.
 
Perhaps they’ll all blame the unemployed!

Technorati Tags: employment, Ian Mulheirn, Management Today, work programme, unemployed, job, job serch

The
future of the government’s Work Programme “hangs in the balance” as
research has revealed that 90 per cent of contracted Work Programme providers will miss their
targets to get people back into work.

“The
future of this vital employment scheme hangs in the balance,” said Ian
Mulheirn, Director of the SMF.  “The programme aims to get some of the
hardest to reach people off benefits and into work, but past performance
shows that providers will be unable to meet the criteria required of
them by the DWP. As reported in Management Today

The statistic raises a number of questions:

• Were the targets too high?
• Were the providers promising too much when they applied for the contract?
• Were the providers competent?
• Is the economic downturn so deep that the job situation makes delivery impossible?
• Are employers just not employing
  

I’ve no doubt that the answers, arguments and “justification” will depend upon being in Government, Providers.
 
Perhaps they’ll all blame the unemployed!

I love working with new sales teams. In particular I enjoy planning how to to restructure a sales team to maximise sales.

Pertinent questions
Recently I was talking to a Sales Director that was concerned because his sales team, as a whole, wasn’t meeting target. Some of the team met their individual targets easily and exceeded them, others were average and some below average. The Sales Director was continually asking “Were the targets too high, Was the sales team capable of meeting the required results? or was the economy to blame?”. All very pertinent questions but ones that didn’t deliver the answers he was looking for.

Focussing on stars and passengers
In my experience a major reason why Sales Directors have problems with targets is because their focus is often confused by the stars and the passengers in their team (Stars are probably producing all they can and passengers simply reduce the good effect of the stars!).

Instead I persuaded him to focus on the group of people who are making “average Sales” and just below, which tends to be the larger number of people in any team. If this group could raise their sales by just 5% – 10% the effect can be to massively increase sales.
Action plan in the making!

email me: stephen@assimilating-talent if you would like a SKYPE call to discuss your sales team issues.

One of my best friends popped in for dinner last night. Over drinks we talked about how his business was managing with the financial downturn. Increases in unemployment, London riots and business difficulties were all discussed but I was delighted when he told me that his business was “Doing better than expected”. I heard about the new business plan that I expect will generate a healthy growth for the next year.

“What keeps me awake at night”
He’s managed to avoid laying people off work and whilst he wasn’t hiring people he was intending to restructure his team. The thing that was keeping him awake at night was that the restructure might cause some of his good people to leave. “I know jobs are hard to find right now but good people are still able to move quite easily” he explained.

5 Point Plan solution
After discussing much of the content of an article I wrote some months ago HERE for IQPC we talked about strategies for retaining his good people. In the end we settled on a five point plan. It would be specific to detail in this blog post but if you’d like to hear how we arrived at the solution then email me at stephen@assimilating-talent.com and we can arrange a SKYPE call and I can fill you in. 

As you know I spend much of my time advising companies on why their team restructure “just isn’t working as planned”.

Good people are always attractive to the competition
Too often it’s because good people leave. Their companies, however, are often unaware that some key staff are unhappy and end up screaming “What a disaster” when they do leave. Blindness to the impending situation is no excuse because there are always clues. The other thing to consider is that especially in poor economic conditions, good salespeople, good managers and well connected executives are ALWAYS attractive to competitors.

INfrequently asked questions
The questions I think more businesses should regularly ask themselves are:

• What is negative (financial, morale, targets) impact on the business if _____ left?
• What is the risk of ____ leaving? (1-10)
• Have we identified a successor?
• Is that successor able to do the job at 100% effectiveness NOW?
• If not at 100% what % could they achieve?
• If not NOW then how many months will it be before they will be ready?
• What would happen in the meantime?

I’m currently offering a video SKYPE conversation to discuss team restructure and if you would like to take advantage of this then email me at stephen@assimilating-talent.com to arrange a convenient time.  
 

Last week two people contacted me to discuss the “advantages of failed recruitment” that I mention in my business and conference talks. So I thought I would let my blog buddies benefit too.

Time-Line
Picture a business wanting to recruit a new team leader…3 Months
Time taken to induct and allow new leader to in-bed……..3 months
Time taken to identify failure and dismiss…………………..3 Months
Time taken to recruit new leader …………………………….3 Months

“That’s a whole year of lost opportunities that allows the competition to take advantage” and the competition can make huge strides if they know how!

If you’d like to have a consultation with me on SKYPE on the topic of
“Don’t risk another expensive recruitment failure…when you don’t have to” or
“How to take advantage of the competitions misfortune”
then email me at stephen@assimilating-talent.com to arrange a convenient time.

For further information:
HERE