Saturday, January 27, 2007

Expect Employees To Be "Team Players"

In some organizations, employees are allowed to be openly negative and critical. While managers and owners cannot mandate how employees feel about their jobs or employer, they can expect employees to work well as a team and keep criticism of the Company and fellow employees to a minimum. Negative talk and uncooperative attitudes must be discouraged and managed. And in a sales environment, it doesn’t take much for a customer to get wind of a sales rep’s negative attitude, which yields negative thoughts about your company. In other words, employees must clearly understand that, regardless of their feelings, they are expected to work well with others, have a positive attitude as they go about their jobs and keep criticisms to themselves or only discuss them with their manager. They must never express negative feelings to customers or prospects. Employees that are allowed to remain negative and uncooperative will have a negative influence on those around them, as well as your client base. If an employee simply cannot stop being negative and uncooperative, it might be best if they looked for employment elsewhere.

Good Luck & Good Selling!
Russ

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

View Sales Reps as Profit Centers

An approach that can work well in assessing how effective sales personnel are is to maintain a profit and loss statement on each sales rep. Generally, this is not a complex thing to do. Each rep generates sales and gross profit. And each rep has expenses such as base salary, commission, benefits, bonus, office expenses such as rent and utilities, telephone expense, support expenses such as a portion of secretarial and clerical employees' wages and benefits, travel and entertainment, etc. By tracking sales, gross profit and expenses for a sales rep, you will be able to determine how "profitable" a particular sales rep is. This is valuable information in evaluating the effectiveness of sales reps and marketing efforts. The danger in evaluating only sales and gross profit numbers is that some sales reps are much more expensive than others depending on compensation and spending habits. Beware, however, that excellent sales reps sometimes are more effective because they spend more on things such as cellular telephones in following up with customers and travel and entertainment due to more proactive contact with customers. Others are wasteful in how they use both of these "tools". And still others do not use these "tools" enough. Tracking these expenses on an individual profit and loss statement can uncover many of these issues.


Good Luck & Good Selling!
Russ