Questions re: management of a sales group

[Zharova]

Maybe that's off topic but I would appreciate any input.

I manage a sales group.

1. Do you think it worth making sales people write daily reports re: meetings?

2. How many meetings a day should have a sales agent?

Please advice.

[Oogiem]

1. Do you think it worth making sales people write daily reports re: meetings?

2. How many meetings a day should have a sales agent?

I think 90% of all meetings are worthless so my knee jerk reaction is 0 meetings is better. Certainly a daily meeting is not needed. When are they going to have time to talk to clients to actually sell stuff if they are stuck in meetings all day?

If you have a good team all you really care about is are they meeting the quota of sales set for them within the legal and ethical constraints you set. If someone can do that with 5 minutes of work a day, fine if it takes someone 6 days a week also fine, it's their choice. All you need to track is results.

[TesTeq]

If you have a good team...

And if you have a bad team meetings will not fix it.

[clango]

Do you mean meeting all together or meeting of the sales agents with the potential customer?

[cwoodgold]

I think 90% of all meetings are worthless so my knee jerk reaction is 0 meetings is better. Certainly a daily meeting is not needed. When are they going to have time to talk to clients to actually sell stuff if they are stuck in meetings all day?

Possibly when Zharova said "meetings" he/she meant talking to clients.

If you have a good team all you really care about is are they meeting the quota of sales set for them within the legal and ethical constraints you set. If someone can do that with 5 minutes of work a day, fine if it takes someone 6 days a week also fine, it's their choice. All you need to track is results.

Likely Oogie is right. However, it can sometimes be worthwhile to keep track of work of salespeople other than actual sales. If each sale is a large amount of money and you want to pay your salespeople more often than just giving them a big commission for each sale, and if the salespeople are not very self-directed -- perhaps they're young and accustomed to being in school and having a schedule and someone to tell them what to do -- then it might be worthwhile to pay them for the time they spend trying to sell. Or, you can trust them and pay them regularly and only complain if a long time goes by with not enough sales. There are advantages to trusting them -- they may learn to be disciplined and self-directed, and they may feel good about being trusted, and this can motivate them to work hard. There are also advantages to keeping track of them.

The number of meetings with clients per day will depend on the particular type of product and methods of sales. You could experiment to see what works best.

A pep talk at the beginning of the day could be good. You could hand out drums and things, have some fun, and keep it short.

[Zharova]

When wrote about meetings I meant sale agents meetings with customers.

1. Do you think it worth making sales people write daily reports re: meetings they had?

2. How many meetings a day should have an average sales agent?

[Oogiem]

When wrote about meetings I meant sale agents meetings with customers.

1. Do you think it worth making sales people write daily reports re: meetings they had?

2. How many meetings a day should have an average sales agent?

Thanks for the clarification on what you meant by meetings.

To number one no I don't think it is reasonable to write a daily report on customer calls. Weekly at best if you have people you do not trust or are seeing problems but the number of customer calls is not a good guideline for how much is being sold in my experience. I'd rather spend time on seeing how my sales agents qualify their prospects, how do they meet the prospects needs and what are their final sale numbers. None of that is related to a number of meetings. If I am a good sales agent and I develop a good customer who makes one or 2 huge orders because I've solved their problems with my product then isn't that better than talking to 30 people who won't buy much or at all?

So to number 2 I'd say there is no reasonable number. It will totally depend on the average dollar value of your products, the long term customer building you do as a company to keep customers coming back. How long your product lasts before needing replacement and so on.

For example. I just closed a big sale of 3 rams going to 3 flocks in Washington state. 2 of the flocks are return customers. I worked with all 3 to choose animals so that they can trade among themselves for a number of years and not have to come back for new bloodlines. On the surface it looks like I am cutting my own customer base off, but instead they know they will come back to me and pay my price, which is higher than most flocks for sheep when they do need new blood. I solved their problems and I'll get return business from it. The "sales calls" for this sale happened over the last several months as I gathered their needs and concerns and then selected animals that would meet them. On a sales call basis some days I traded 8-10 e-mail messages with the people, sometimes we went several weeks with no contact. There is no way to set a daily or even weekly goal for this sort of sale.