Sales Force Management: Increase Customer Contact Time

Sales Force Management:- The business of salespeople is to sell. But to sell, they have to maximize customer contact time, in other words for itinerant salespeople face-to-face time. But the missions of a sales force are not limited to this phase of face to face but encompass a set of activities: prepare sales interviews, monitor, manage administrative tasks … This post offers tools to analyze the seller’s activity in order to maximize this lucrative step of face to face. The activity of the commercial is shared between different missions: Such as

Operational Missions

• The preparation of the visits (preparation of the lists of customers to see, making a telephone appointment …)
• Face-to-face interviews
• The visit reports
• The commercial treatment post visit (stimulus offers …)

Tasks inherent to the Functions

• Administrative management: management of expense reports …
• Training (improvement of salesperson skills)
• The meetings

To obtain an exhaustive vision of the time used by the sales force, it is necessary to add the “constrained” times such as displacements.

1. Statement Sheet

To improve the time of contact with the customers, in particular the time of face to face, it is relevant to make a statement of the time consumed by the different activities of the commercial.

For this survey, it is best to work with several sellers over a period of about 2 weeks.

A small note: by experience, it is always difficult to motivate sellers for this type of approach. The best is to involve the selected employees in a project group with the objective of “improving customer contact time”, and to involve them in all phases of the process: from problematic to research and selection of solutions.

• The types of activity are to be modulated according to the specificity of your profession.
• The “Remarks” column provides elements of understanding a particular event.

As for training and meetings, it is better to count them separately, by monthly zing the time spent.

2. Analysis Sheet

Once the readings are done, you have to consolidate the times collected in a spreadsheet. In the example the duration have been monthly.

You have at your disposal the data that will allow you to analyze the situation, to identify time-consuming and unprofitable tasks.

For the analysis, the question of the reference frame is raised. It is difficult to say that 11.8% of the operational time spent in preparation for a visit is correct or not. It depends on the business sector of the company. A commercial engineer on a sharp job will need a lot of preparation time, the commercial meetings being more profitable. On the other hand, the marketing of a so-called “banal” product implies a maximization of customer time: more visits = more turnover. The best is to debrief with the project group to evaluate each phase by comparing for example the results of each commercial pilot. Thus you will be in a position to highlight lines of action to free the seller of unprofitable tasks to give him more time to devote to sales.