Developing an Outside Sales Force

Guest post by: John Brennan
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Adapting to Technology and the Internet - By John Brennan

Through careful management of your outside sales force you can create more efficient marketing campaigns -- you'll know exactly how many leads you need to generate and how many of them the sales team should close.

Key Tasks in Developing your Outside Sales Force
If you have multiple channels, you may need to define a sales process for each one. Think about the way you sell to each channel and estimate the number of processes you'll need. Define your sales process, your reporting requirements and project your volume and revenue.

Then design marketing campaigns to feed your sales force with qualified leads.

You can select one of the four ways to organize your sales territory - by geography, by industry, by company size or by customer problem. Estimate the number of reps you'll need to hit your goals and what each rep's quota should be. It's important to hire enough reps and to set realistic quotas. It's a challenging task, particularly for a young or rapidly-growing company without a lot of historical data. If you set unattainably high quotas and your reps aren't achieving their income goals, they may feel demoralized.

Make sure you have good tools for recruiting and selecting the right people, compensation, quotas, training, reporting process, motivating and managing performance.

Good luck and may you win more business!

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Adapting to Technology and the Internet - By John Brennan

About the Author: John Brennan

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John Brennan Ed.D. Dr. Brennan is President of Interpersonal Development, LLC, a training and development firm. Interpersonal Development has provided sales training and coaching to more than 3,000 sales reps from over 100 companies. A native of Australia, Dr. Brennan received his doctorate from the University of Rochester. His dissertation researched the effectiveness of Behavioral Modeling Technology in training people in interpersonal skills. While he has spent most of his career designing or delivering training, he was also a Vice-President of Sales of a training and development franchise with operations in 25 markets. Dr. Brennan has designed and delivered sales training in North America, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Middle East. He has been a guest speaker at numerous national and regional professional conferences. When Microsoft wanted Best Practices articles on sales for their web site, they called Dr. Brennan. The results are at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX011387391033.aspx His firm’s clients have included Volvo, The Prudential, Merrill Lynch, Eastman Kodak, Gannett, Equifax Europe, the Economist Group and countless small businesses.
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