Now that christmas is over and the snow’s melted many retailers are counting the costs of a poor trading season. Next, Waterstones and HMV have all announced fewer sales compared to the same time last year and store closures are expected. With families feeling the VAT rises and inflationary pressures sales are unlikely to improve quickly.

Many companies have been telling me that 2011 will be the year where sales will be vital to survival. The tactic to improve sales team results seems to be to increase targets and take the sales team on an away day to “align sales with core functions and client needs for the next twelve months”.

In my experience, away days where management sweeten a bitter pill of increased sales targets and restructured sales territories with “improved and innovative marketing initiatives” don’t increase motivation nor improve the way sales people approach potential customer’s needs and certainly don’t last more than a week, far less twelve months.

If one must have an away day then it needs to be linked with a measured programme of change that covers a long period and where changes in direction can be identified and implemented more easily.

My electricity and telephone/broadband contacts are up for renewal and in the run-up to the festive season I was receiving three or four phone calls a day from salespeople who expected to be able to “move my account” after a brief and cursory quote promising to save me money.

However, I’m a buyer who takes the attitude that if it’s going to cost less then what am I going to have to “give up”. The salesperson phoning me often seemed aghast when I asked for more details such as proof of their after-sales service claims, websites so that I could check their boasts and a confused silence on the other end of the line when asked to email me details of the contract so that I could study them at my leisure.

I’m much more used to dealing with sophisticated sales-teams selling Banking, Financial Services and large ticket products and I’ve been thinking how these salesteams are changing. The coming year is going to be hard and will result in agreement times between sales proposal and acceptance or rejection being extended by twenty percent or more. This could mean that some sales may take many more months to complete than before.

Already I’ve observed Sales Directors being instructed by their Boards to reduce “Toxic costs” even more vigorously than before. These “Toxic costs”  include travel (car costs), telephone charges, training budgets, sales offices and even admin back-up. I know of three well known companies who are gearing up their HR Departments to advise them on processes for removing future “non-fertile salespeople”. (A description that’s likley to casue confusion at some futue occasion, I think!)

It’s wrong to suggest that all people believe that the less a product costs the more attractive it is. People want to buy reliability, after care service, consistency and results as promised as part of their purchase.

If a company is really planning to grow sales it’s hard to understand why it needs to reduce product quality.