We have encountered many moronic sales management moves that lead to a dysfunctional sales team. Needless to say, this ManageSmarter.com article – How to Ruin a Sales Force – caught my attention. The bulleted article is well worth the quick read, but let me call out a couple points I particularly appreciated:
Corrupted jobs. Decontaminate jobs that are degraded with non-selling tasks such as “fetch and get” after-the-sale customer service duties.
We’re living this one today. We have a new salesperson at one of our logistics customers who is actually doing deliveries himself. The reason is that the operations dept. is not reliable to complete the deliveries. Unbelievable.
And a common issue we see when working with new customers:
Complex incentive plans. Reduce complexity by reducing the number of measures to no more than three.
We have seen plans spread out over 3 Excel spreadsheets. Math and I have a strained relationship so I was astounded at the commission plan. I had no clue regarding targets, goals or rewards. Simple really is better here.
Finally, a plug for what we do:
Random recruitment practices. Maintain your hiring standards with a nationally managed recruitment model.