If not watched closely, sales departments have a tendency to shrink in effort and in success until they almost disappear.

This led us to the realization that sales departments can be inadvertently misplaced and closed. This is extremely detrimental to the business because a business without a sales department is just a ghost of what it could be.

Has your Sales department disappeared or been misplaced? Here are a few ways to find out.

Percentage Of Time Analysis

One of the companies at the seminar was composed of the owner and 4 salespeople. It would appear that this is a large sales force. However, a time analysis revealed that all but one spent 10% of their time (about 4 hours per week) on sales. The rest of their time, they did service and sales of other products, paperwork, service calls etc.. Counting heads is not as accurate as counting hours. We suggest you take an accurate count of the amount of time each employee spends on actual sales activities - prospecting and doing demos. The result may surprise you. How much time is your sales department actually selling?

Number Of Sales Presentations

Another way to measure the size of your sales department is a game we call "Count The Presentations". Take an accurate count with customer names of the presentations or sales visits performed last week. First, calculate how many presentations is a day's work in your industry. If you sell complex products to businesses, it could be one per day. If you sell in-home to consumers, it could be two per day. If you sell by phone, it could be 30 per day. Take your total presentation that should be done each day and divide by the number of presentations per day that should be done. The number you get from tthis formula represents the real number pof salespeople on your team. If it is less than you expected, you need to hire or refocus your current team on sales.

Hours Of Operation

It is a proven fact that customers prefer to buy when they are too busy. We do better when we make it easy for the customer tpo buy. If you sell to the public, that means you should be working retail hours. Business people don't want visitors at their busiest times and restaurants want no salespeople during their peak traffic periods. Does your sales staff work these prime selling hours or are the stuck with the nine to five mentality?

One way to estimate the "force" in your sales force is to see what percentage of the golden selling time your team is in the field. If you set the "golden selling time" as 5 to 9 Monday to Thursday and Saturday, that is a total of 24 hours per week. Measure what percentage of those hours your staff is out selling and you have a good measure of the percentage of a sales force you actually have. If you have 4 salespeople who are in the field 50% of those hours, we believe you will find you should discount the size of your sales force by 50%.

It is also interesting to me that many companies who struggle in sales have new recruits and part timers working the best sales hours. This is a serious handicap to success. It just doesn't pay to have your experienced and talented staff in when fewer customers come by and your least experienced and successful team on the floor when most buyers come in.

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