Best Way to Control Your Sales Team

In the context of sales management, controlling should be synonymous with the word monitoring.

Controlling is a matter of comparing actual performance with the standards set and taking the necessary action to rectify any negative variances.

Controlling performance standards

As previously mentioned, these should be quantifiable so that actual performance can be easily measured against the standards.

The frequency of controls will depend upon the standard being measured. They should not happen so often that the salespeople feel that their every action is being checked, but at the same time they need to be frequent enough to enable any required action to be taken before it is too late.

Targets set annually still need to be monitored on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis, depending upon the products and market. If you leave it until the end of the year, it is obviously too late to make amendments.

In order to monitor performance, you will need data, which would normally be supplied by the salespeople, in the form of orders, reports and returns. Therefore you have to rely upon the honesty of the team. This should be no problem provided you have earned their trust and respect. There may be the odd occasion when some of the information you receive from this source strikes you as suspicious: for example, a call rate which is much higher than the team average. In such cases, talk face-to-face to the individual concerned to establish the facts before taking any action or jumping to conclusions.

Before taking action to rectify negative variances, consider carefully all possible reasons for the discrepancy. There may be very valid ones such as illness or holidays. Also look for a trend. If one of your team has not met target one week, leave it for the next two or three weeks and then if that person is consistently below target, take action, which initially should be a discussion with that individual to discover the facts and resolve the matter mutually.