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Managing Sales Results

Abhishek Sahay
Friday, June 4, 2010
Abhishek Sahay
‘Sales results’ is a phenomenon and managing it is like taming a beast. Sales result is the most objective indicator to the working (or otherwise) of your organization strategy and hence, every quarter end, millions of companies across the globe either celebrate or think back in introspection about the number or the measure. Investors and institutions wait anxiously to learn the outcome. And most importantly the entity that ‘supposedly’ makes this happen, the ‘sales team’, experiences an elation or a dip in emotion when it starts preparation for the next quarter.

We usually think of the sales team or the people selling in the field as the ones who impact the sales results. If the results are bad, sales people are put to task and if the results are good, all are rewarded. But is that the whole truth – sales results reflecting the good or bad performance of the sales team? Can accountability for sales results be assigned to people on the field alone? When one looks at all the leading indicators that impact the sales result, it becomes clear that the accountability for those leading indicators cannot be assigned to people on the field alone; e.g. an organization chooses a wrong pricing model on a product. Irrespective of how smart your sales people are, would the organization get the desired sales results? Or, if you do not have good quality people on the field, irrespective of how good your product is, would your organization get the desired results?

When accounting for sales results, it’s important to take a holistic view of all the leading factors that impact it and then learn about the entities who own up these factors.

* Simply put, there are three major entities internal to an organization that impact the sales results.
*Senior Management who deal at the policy level
* Managers who deal with talent
* Sales people on the field who deal with sales activity on daily basis

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