By: Emilia De Simone, Director, Consulting Services

In the face of a highly competitive business environment, increasing the effectiveness of your sales force can significantly improve the financial performance of your organization. How do you improve sales force effectiveness? There are many moving parts that ultimately combine to form a sales organization which is driven to succeed. The following is an overview of some of the moving parts:

1. Clear and Well-Communicated Business Direction and Sales Strategies
   • A sales organization cannot perform effectively without understanding the business objectives and sales strategies of the organization. Many organization do not invest in the time and effort required to communicate company direction and business priorities. This creates confusion among the sales force in that they cannot make the connection between the intent of supporting programs and processes and what the organization requires from their efforts.
2. A Sales Organization Structure Aligned with the Objectives of the Business
   • To be effective a sales organization must have clearly defined roles and responsibilities that align with the sales activities required from the field. The sales organization structure should take into account market and channel objectives addressed in the sales strategies; product and account management strategies; how business development will be addressed; the technical or sales support required; etc.
3. A Sales Compensation Plan that Drives the Right Behaviours
   • Sales compensation should support your business model and essentially be aligned with the goals and sales strategies of the organization. An effective sales compensation plan should communicate what you value as an organization and where you want sales people to spend their time and effort. Sales compensation costs can be very costly to an organization; ensuring you have the right sales compensation plan and performance metrics in place that drives the right sales behaviours is essential for financial success.
4. Defined Sales Processes and Performance Management Practices
   • Once you have identified plan performance measures it is essential to have sales processes in place which enable efficient tracking and monitoring of performance. Further, identifying performance issues early in the performance year enables management to address concerns and coach staff to ensure financial expectations are met.

While everyone is looking back on 2009 and reminiscing about what has happened in the past year, I thought that it has limited relevance for 2010. From a business perspective, most companies would love to forget 2009 as a time of restructuring, downsizing, re-strategizing or worse yet closing down. Rather, I - being a serial optimist - would like to look forward and present a few proactive thoughts about things that readers can do to constructively influence the performance and results for next year.

Critical to sales success in 2010 will be the need to drive new business growth and account retention. Further, ensuring that salespeople achieve or exceed their targets is also paramount to climbing back to the performance levels that preceded last year's recession. Having said this, sales management is usually not about personally delivering sales, but rather creating the environment that allows salespeople to be successful. How then do we do this for 2010?

First, you have to step back from the minutia, issues, customers etc. and look at the bigger picture. If you could fast forward to December 31, 2010, what would that look like? Creating that vision for yourself and your staff is essential for setting goals and objectives that are realistic and achievable. Further, having the end point sets expectations and allows people to strive and celebrate when they are reached.

Some additional elements of managing for success in 2010 are:

• Preparation - For the next few weeks/months we will still be somewhat in retrenched mode (although with the New Year will hopefully come new budgets and decisions to spend) with some time available. Use this time to prepare and position your sales force for success. What do you need to do to remove roadblocks to sales execution or provide the tools for salespeople to sell more effectively? This might include information, resources, templates or training. Having a competent sales force has been proven to be the greatest factor in developing sustained competitive advantage.
• Focus - Salespeople by their nature are positive and well meaning when performing their work. They have to be to deal with the rejection and frustration that often comes with performing in the sales environment. However, if their activities are unfocused and scattered, they will not achieve optimal performance and their level of frustration will escalate. Assist them in creating focus both through better direction on where to spend their time and effort and through sales incentives and compensation that reward them for delivering on the things that you value and want to pay them for delivering.
• Channel Strategies - Clarity in articulating which sales channels and activities are strategic to delivering the sales vision for 2010 will assist salespeople to behave and execute actions that will increase expected outcomes and elevate close ratios.
• Planning - Most customers have fewer people who can interact with salespeople on a regular basis, which means, unless it is a large/major account with dedicated resources, the amount of time and influence that your salespeople have with the customer is less than it was in the past. This means that with limited opportunity, their information content, presentation and solution to meet the needs of the customer better be spot on, or you will be in trouble. Therefore, more time on planning, assessment of the customer and their situation as well as quality in the alternatives, selection of the preferred alternative to offer the customer and how and what is presented will determine your success.
• People - Getting performance and successful execution from its people is the only way for an organization to achieve targets and expectations. What do your people need to be successful in 2010? They need clear direction, performance management, proper incentives and rewards, coaching and mentoring to improve delivery and they need good management.

While all of this might sound like common sense and the "motherhood and apple pie" of management, we rarely allow ourselves to sit down and address these needs in a way that not only aligns with the business but translates into changes in behavior and sales activity. Instead, we prefer to be busy rather than effective.

If you believe in it are taking a few moments to set some resolutions for the 2010 New Year as I am, resolve to be a better manager and leader through thoughtful realization of the things that are within your control.

All the best for a happy and prosperous New Year.

By: Matt Tyre, Director, Client Services

Game planning your incentive compensation program is very difficult in a fluctuating economy; it's hard to predict whether the economy will steadily climb or have some setbacks for 2010. So, how does this impact your program?

You can protect your company, customers and employees by instituting policies and providing increased communication to your sales force. These protective measures are important to all parties involved in the compensation process.

What you can do is introduce legal terms and conditions in the plan document to sales people and ensure that the company reserves the right to adjust targets where necessary. Assessing and establishing targets is very difficult in the most stable sales environment. Therefore, when the market is in a state of flux, it is even easier for the company to miss, and either set targets too high or low. Communicating to your sales people upfront that the company has a right to make changes if required avoids issues with your sales people questioning why the targets are changing in the future. Of course, this could impact a sales person's compensation payout negatively in their eyes. However, as a company you are protecting your sales person from under payouts if the targets are set too high in a flat economy. The protection for the company, in this case, is against large win-falls for sales people if targets are set too low and the economy corrects itself and shows in the positive territory for 2010.

You don't want to de-motivate your sales force with the wrong incentive plan. This will impact how they interact with your customers. These cases can be avoided by simply stating a policy to change the targets to appropriate levels as required. The message can still remain positive in the communication to ensure there is buy-in to the new policy. Leaving the company open to potential issues with your incentive compensation program can be very costly.