Avantrasara STPM
Sales Team Performance Management – STPM – moves selling – the worlds second oldest profession – into the modern era. It adapts the concept of continuous improvement, made popular by Japanese manufacturing, to the whirlpool of market dynamics. It focuses as much on those dimensions the sales force can’t control as it does the ones it can.
The sales manager can control the number and geography of reps, allocation of territories, sales process, activity rates and sales skills. In some cases she’ll have influence over discounts and over hiring, but not control. Add these together and we only get a subset of the factors influencing the sales team performance.
Outside the control of the sales guys are these aspects, fundamental to customers inclination to buy.
- Design and build quality of product or service
- Market positioning and promotion
- Value proposition – benefits, costs, target customers, target requirements
- Pricing
- Brand Awareness and Trust
- Delivery and service capability
- Competition – how and what they sell
We can have the hardest working, most skilful, highest paid sales force in the world, but it won’t succeed with a badly priced, poorly designed and constructed product with a bad reputation.
On the other hand a merely average sales force will be successful with a well designed and priced quality product which everybody raves about.
Our Sales Team isn’t just the reps and managers in the sales force. It needs to include design and manufacture, marketing and promotion, customer service, accountants and senior management. Each of these functions has an impact on the sales force ability to sell and its contribution needs to be managed every bit as much as call rates, proposals, and win-loss ratios.
Sales Team Performance Management brings together these – sometimes conflicting – functions and finds ways to make the whole package more saleable.
It’s about defining and refining a sales strategy which works.
Related articles
- Stress Test Your STPM (avantrasarastpm.blogspot.com)
- Why Did You Lose That Deal (frontofficebox.com)
- Fake It Till You Make It Never Does (avantrasarastpm.blogspot.com)
- Small Business Strategy for CRM and Sales Pipeline Management (avantrasarastpm.blogspot.com)
