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Developing an Outside Sales Force

Guest post by: John Brennan

Article Overview: By developing and managing your sales process you can more accurately forecast sales, pinpoint problems in the sales process and fix them, gain a better understanding of how your customers use your products, what changes they would like to see and how they perceive quality service and price. Your sales force is more likely to build stronger relationships with your customers when they are face to face with the customer, when they are well-trained and supported by targeted marketing.

Developing an Outside Sales Force

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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Article Tags: quality service, relationships, targeted marketing



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