Working as we do exclusively with private equity-backed businesses, one of the common themes we encounter is the need for more headcount to deliver next year’s increased revenues.
Whist private equity generally loves to support the recruitment of sales people, after all they must bring growth and should be more than self-financing, I am always struck by how little attention is paid to developing the sales resource a business might already employ.
In a world where continuous improvement is a way of life for manufacturing or operations or logistics functions, why is a thing that almost no-one applies the same approach to one of their most expensive and potentially most productive aspects of the business – the sales department.
I’m not just talking about training, which is very rare these days amongst the majority of UK businesses, but the entire sales management approach to constantly looking for ways to improve things such as the targeting of sales effort or the relevant conversion ratios. To do this you first have to understand all of these ‘levers’ of course before you can decide which would be the most effective to ‘pull’ this period and perhaps this is where the knowledge gap lies.
Such knowledge isn’t difficult to acquire, if you know what you don’t know but to simply add more staff to a less than efficient sales operation is to risk spending more than might be necessary on recruitment costs (and we all know how high they can be) and end up with good, new people, performing at the average for the team they join, a level of performance that might be some way below that which they are capable of.
People often raise their game when faced with a high-performance environment but can also do the opposite if circumstances allow it.
So how would you describe the sales performance culture at your firm?