Sales Personnel- the Ongoing HR Challenge
On the other hand, managing the human resources issues related to ensuring the in-house sales force is indeed achieving optimum performance, is an on-going challenge. The issues include compensation, and personnel turnover. The best salesmen want more or leave. The sales personnel that are producing are likely looking for improved compensation or better paying opportunities. Estimates suggest that as much as 70% of the sales work force is looking for a new job at any one time. Sales personnel that are not producing are a cost burden on the business. The two combined are the resource-draining challenge the HR department is continuously engaged in.
Personnel Turnover & Performance Assessment
The costs of managing personnel turnover are not just limited to the costs of hiring and training new personnel, and the business lost during the interim. To manage personnel effectively, the HR department needs to effectively analyse metrics, and communicate with prospects, a combined exercise in continuous monitoring that any performance measurement methodology is remiss without. To be meaningful, some assessment is required, of the amount of time resource sales personnel is engaged in activities that are not specifically customer facing sales activities. For example, a study by McKinsey Global Institute estimates that only 39% of sales’ personnel time is dedicated to sales specific tasks, with the remainder diverted and distracted to such activities as training others, marketing, collections, and other CRM account related work, and even monitoring their own productivity. Clearly, for an accurate assessment of an in-house sales force’s performance and productivity, the HR department needs to assess and quantify activities that are not specific to the sales function itself.
Better HR Focus
Sales outsourcing clearly has advantages. The HR department will be most aware of financial cost reduction relating to salaries, healthcare, vacation and sick days, and retirement and other benefits. Once the man management and remuneration issues of managing a sales force are outsourced, the HR departments responsibilities may not end there- management may choose to involve the HR department directly in the process of formulating new policies related to performance measurement. The challenges of this are not insignificant, for many of the functions that an in-house sales force relied upon other departments for, will now have to be implemented into a new policy for the outsourced sales force inter-acting with other in-house departments, in areas such as production, and finance, for example.
Alternatively, it may be the HR department is acutely aware of the value of specific sales personnel, and selects to outsource peripheral sales-support functions as a means of increasing the productivity of their own in-house talent. Fewer than 10% of sales force personnel are thought to be capable of continuously achieving outstanding performance continuously. Something of a rare breed, businesses are continuously challenged to meet the reward expectations of this talent, and hold onto it. This is just one circuitous headache for the human resources department, for no matter how well designed a business’s remuneration policies, a truly outstanding sales person has the potential to perform beyond expectations, and re-write the script.
Better Sales Performance
The best sales talent is savvy enough to know how to achieve targets, and comprehend fully how to replicate that performance continuously. In a conducive environment, such talent is likely to thrive, by replicating their performances across their teams. Achieving better and better results by innovating with techniques, processes, and other management tools, is a natural progression that is perhaps both instinctively and intuitively motivated. So it is little surprise that such teams transform themselves into stand alone businesses providing sales outsourcing services to other businesses.
And it is this process of transforming the accumulated knowledge, skills, and experience of the best of the sales professionals, into highly effective sales forces, that is the game changer. Sales are a competitive activity, with parallels to other competitive activities, such as sport. And it is not surprising that the best, intend to build on their success, taking it to higher and higher levels. Congregate such talent into teams, and the potential for achieving significant synergistic success in producing increasingly better yields, skyrockets. The best sales persons know how to improve the performance of the team as a whole, and they are far more successful sales managers than most businesses could ever hope to maintain in-house.
