Controls Managers Can Use To Improve Sales Performance And Encourage Ethical Behavior

Role of Sales Managers in Revenue Generation

Sales managers are the conductors of a company revenue engine. They not only create high performance sales team but also nurture them to generate higher sales in respect with meeting the objectives of business enterprise. Sales manager is responsible to inspire their teams and assist them to meet their goals while meeting necessary customer needs. Moreover, running a sales team is a big challenge and success will always depend on the team ability to meet up performance goals (Cadogan, Lee, Tarkiainen and Sundqvist, 2009).

For an organization, sales need to stay alive in the same way like human needs water. Business will not be alive if there were no sales. Moreover, the key factor in closing sales is building of relationships (Piercy, Cravens and Lane, 2012). Salespeople and sales managers are both familiar with the products that they sell and also best procedures in which the product need to be sold to potential customer.  However, Salespeople work directly with the public in selling of products and sales manager oversee teams of sales people.

Knowing how to sell and effectively communicate is very important for the sales person. To sell a products, the sales man need to communicate with the potential customers. These sales people are also responsible to maintain relationships with the clients, following leads and generate referrals (White, Absher and Huggins, 2011). They need to have an adequate information about the product they are selling so as to raise more level of customer satisfaction. By passing off clients after the sales, they are also passing an opportunity to increase profits, reduce churn and build a meaningful customer experience.

In any organization, the ultimate KPI for an objective of sales management is revenue. However, to achieve a forecast performance, the major objective established by sales manager is – coaching of salespeople on their behaviours, skills and techniques, recruiting reps, forecasting of sales performance as per quarterly, monthly or yearly basis, evaluating and tweaking sales process (Ingram, LaForge and Schwepker Jr, 2007). One of the major aspects in increasing the performance of salespeople is sales force organization. It is the process of allocating and managing sales resources to achieve sales and marketing goals. An effective sales force organization provides account and geographic coverage, minimizes wasted resources and time and confirms a higher probability of achieving sales quotas.

For achieving respective sales target, it is necessary to align overall sales with the marketing strategy (Hughes and Ahearne, 2010). Moreover, one of the most significant aspect of sales force organization is to allocate the resources to respective sales territories.  Sales force organization takes account of business skills and specialization. For example, if the company is selling complex technical products, sales manager will recruit salespeople who are good in technical knowledge so that they can effectively sell the product to the potential customer. Moreover, the company can also invest training programme where technical skills of the sales people can be developed. An important element in sales force organization is the support available to direct sales efforts (Sullivan, Peterson and Krishnan, 2012). Organization can enhance productivity of salespeople with the help of telemarketing team to cover time-consuming tasks, for example, setting up of appointments, low value orders. The quality of salespersons’ prospect can be improved by developing lead generation programme in response to creating relationship with marketing. These are all the roles in respect will improving sales people performance.

The Importance of Salespeople and Sales Managers

The next phase where sales manager can influence performance of sales people is with the help of effective recruitment. Recruitment involves all the actions manager engage in to acquire pool of qualified candidates for vacant position (Rodgers, Stenhouse, McCreaddie and Small, 2013). In the process of recruitment, sales manager can select the right sales people to do significantly improve in performance by focusing on the personal characteristics and traits. These personal traits fall into various broad categories like – physical traits (age, height, sex and physical attractiveness), psychological traits (general and verbal intelligence, mathematical ability, and previous sales experience), personality traits such as (empathy, dominance, sociability and need for achievement).

By identifying the personnel with these aptitudes, sales manager can ensure future success in relation with the performance of the sales people. Moreover, brewing managers always emphasis to hire more of the sales person that would be perceived by customers as relatively more knowledgeable and experienced. In addition, they need to hire sales person with positive personality traits that will help in dealing with the people – such as ego drive, dominance and aggressiveness (Tilson and Simonsen, 2013), needed for the achievement of the sales target framed by the executives of organization. Therefore, it can be said that recruiting and selecting the right people is an important aspect for every sales manager and this can use to improve sales performance of the sales people.

But like any skill, even naturally adept salespeople need to hone their skills with the help of consistent sales training. It is necessary for the organization to invest in training to ensure salespeople have the skills needed for success. This belief is supported by both research and experience that training can enhance sales person performance. However, it is important that managers need to support and reinforce sales training or it will not lead in any optimal results. With the creation of interactive training and by analysing current capability of the employee to sell products, sales manager can fill the gap in performance. Sales manager can design and develop a series of training workshops that will develop the skills and knowledge in the sales person that they are needed to sell more effectively. No matter the experience level of each sales person, sales person need to engage him or her in the proper training programme immediately.

Source: (Pappas and Flaherty, 2008)

In an effective sales training programme, sales manager can improve performance of sales people in various ways. For framing an effective training plan, sales manager need to align sales training methods with the business strategy, goals and needs (Zoltners, Sinha and Lorimer, 2008). This will help both organization and sales managers to save precious time, efforts and energy. In next step, sales manager need to then prepare a blueprint plan for each and every employee so that with the general training programme, a specific focus can also be embedded to improve that area of employee where there is lack of skills. For example, if a sales person is good in communication skills but lacking in closing the deal, manager can focus on that aspect (Hughes, Le Bon and Rapp, 2013). Therefore, by implementing necessary training, sales manager can drive employee or sales people to the organizational objectives or goals. This will not only create a value for the respective organization but also gives them a competitive advantage in the market.

Increasing Sales Performance through Sales Force Organization

In addition, for raising the sales performance and productivity, sales manager also need to focus on motivation from the bottom line as it is said that a motivated sales team is an effective sales team. For building an effective motivated sales force, sales manager need to first establish a set of goals as if the employee did not know what to aspire, achieving something will not be easy. It did not just about sales quotas as different sales people motivated in different ways (Miao, Evans and Shaoming, 2007). While quotas may be work for some individual but a contest or personal goal may be a better choice for others. Therefore, Sales manager need to work with each individual salesperson to find out what will work best for them. They also need to create a “sense of purpose” as it will inspire sales people to work harder at their jobs. Moreover, the foundation of motivation is trust and so sales manager need to win employee trust. This will create a positive environment where employees are feel appreciated and engaged and this will inspire their loyalty towards the organization.

In the process of motivation, sales manager also need to focus on creating a culture of recognition. Commission does not always motivate every employee as some of them want to be a recognized individual in front of all of their peers. That praise and recognition motivated them to not only work harder but also work together. This process is also called as Intrinsic Motivation. It does not involve working on activities for the sake of an external reward; rather, it involves the feeling of inner pleasure in the activity itself (Miao, Evans and Shaoming, 2007). There are many factors that encourage intrinsic motivation. For example, cooperation, curiosity, competition and control,

In last, Sales manager can motivate their sales personnel by recognizing individual strengths and skills as this will build a balanced team in an organization. If the sales manager leverage diversity of your team members and identify which characteristics or skills is affecting them in reaching to the targeted goal, can empower to improve them and thus ensure team members to respect one another.

It is assumed that salespeople enhance the value delivered to the customers by establishing cooperative relationships (Agnihotri, Kothandaraman, Kashyap and Singh, 2012). These relationships cannot be perceived if the sales person acts in an unethical manner. Ethics, as the branch of moral philosophy deals with moral judgment, standards and rule of conduct governing in individual and societies and determining what is wrong or right. Ethical behaviour in the sales relationships results on the part of salesperson in encouraging welfare of the customer and this makes it widely recognised societal norms.

Sales Training as a Key to Performance Improvement

It is ascertained that salespeople who act in an ethical manner are factual in their communication and which stimulate customer to purchase the product, as they believe it will definitely benefit them. Similarly, ethical sales person eschew behaviours such as lying about availability of product, selling of products and services that cannot be reuse or resold. Therefore, learning of ethical practices helps salesperson to not provide misleading information to the customer. This praise and increase the goodwill of an organization in the whole industry and market and a company reputation plays an important role at the beginning of relationships.

Although the business enterprise set some rules for their sales person to obey, a number of conditions surrounding sale positions give an opportunity for ethics to be negotiated. The key to gain customer loyalty is the ethical selling. It is essential to develop and maintain trust with consumers, which will lead to bringing repeat business and increased profitability (Steward, Walker, Hutt and Kumar, 2010).

It is very important for an organization and sales manager to stop unethical sales practice as it can damage a brand or lead to unfaithful customers. Moreover, employing unethical practices during the sales process can also make the deal close with prospective customers or up-sell a current customer. Some customers have a long-term commitment towards an organization, and due to one sales person unethical behaviour, organization can lose loyal customers and this will be directly beneficial to the competitor enterprise as customer definitely switches to another side. Therefore, sales manager need to focus on various ethical aspects connected to the organization so as to raise sales quota and performance of sales person.

Sales representative should always do what is best for the customers and organization (Homburg, Muller and Klarmann, 2011). However, when it comes to difficult decisions such as risking the loss of sale by being honest or making excuses for late delivery, sales representatives may avoid making the ethical decisions unless they have no choice but to do so. From long terms perspectives, these decisions made by them will enhance customer brand loyalty towards the organization and thus will be proved profitable for the business enterprise.

In last, every personality is different in terms of goals, talent, skills and experience. Even every situation is different. There will never be same corporate environment with identical objectives, policies or product. The sales manager needs to focus on dynamic and changing business environment so as to influence sales people in an effective way. There will be always some risks like unethical behaviour of employees or rejection of the sales quota but sales managers need to deal with it for achieving the organization objectives.

Motivation – Key to Building an Effective Sales Force

References

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