Getting more out of your salespeople.

If yours is an average foundry, your salespeople probably cost you about $90,000 a year, including salary, bonus, fringes, expenses and indirect costs. Or about $45 an hour!

Because call hours are the only really productive time a salesperson has, and nonselling time simply supports call times, all of the salesperson's costs should logically be allocated to call hours. So, if your salespeople spend only a third of their time on face-to-face or telephone selling, their cost is $135 an hour. At this rate, you should make sure they are as productive as possible. In our industry, salespeople have many different responsibilities related to ongoing servicing of accounts--particularly the larger, more important ones. So, a considerable amount of their time is tied up in nonselling activities. It is not unusual to see casting salespeople spending less than a third of their time in face-to-face and telephone selling.

And, it is unfortunate that many salespeople, after a number of years, lose sight of what their real job is. With some, it is a major accomplishment to get them out of the foundry every other week.

Why? They become fixated on details, spending a major part of their valuable time shuffling paper, expediting and generally doing things that other people should be handling.

To realize improvements in sales productivity, you should first conduct a selling time audit to determine just how much time is being spent on direct selling, customer service and sales-related tasks. Sit down with your salespeople and find out how many hours or days are being spent in each of the following areas:

* face-to-face meetings;

* waiting for meetings;

* phone calls;

* travel;

* time planning;

* call, expense reports;

* other management reports;

* sales, other meetings;

* territory analysis;

* forecasting, planning, budgeting;

* market analysis;

* training, seminars;

* customer service;

* preparing quotations;

* credit work;

* order entry;

* expediting orders;

* layout, patterns, etc.

One technique that may prove helpful is to ask your salespeople to divide 100% of their time among a specific group of activities like those listed above.

While you may be surprised at how little of your salespeople's time is spent on direct selling, you will probably get a real shock when you add up the total cost of all the less important tasks being performed. And this does not include the missed opportunity cost of sales being lost as a result of your salespeople spending too much of their valuable time on things that should be handled by someone else at a substantially lower salary level.

Delegating

Assigning sales-related activities such as some customer service, order entry, credit work, expediting, market analysis, quoting and layout to other people in your organization could free up a surprising amount of selling time.

Another way to increase sales productivity is to transfer smaller, less important accounts from your heavy hitters to junior salespeople. Then, your pros can spend more of their time on large, important customers and prospects.

A third successful technique for improving productivity is to assign your salespeople a quote of calls, forcing them to delegate many present tasks to others. In determining the level of sales effort needed, you will first have to list each customer and prospect plant you wish to call on within a specific time frame--quarterly, semiannually or annually--and the number of buying influences to be contacted in each plant. Then, rank these by their volume and profit contribution potentials to establish priorities.

Next, estimate the number of calls required for each customer, prospect, or group of customers and prospects in a territory, ranked by profit potential. Now, determine the total number of sales calls required for each group, based on prior experience and future expectations. Be sure to allow for unexpected problem calls on customers.

When establishing guidelines for customers calls, you may want to peg the annual contact frequency to levels of customer profit contribution potential. Prospect calls could follow similar guidelines. However, there may be considerable deviation from these ranges, depending on unique requirements of a customer or prospect. Multiple buying influences at a particular plant should be considered in establishing call frequency.

Your marketing plan should spell out in detail a list of both customers and prospects and the expected call frequency for each. Keep good records so progress against these objectives can be monitored throughout the year.

Examining how your sales people are spending their time can pay large dividends. Ask them how they think their efforts should be redirected and what opportunities are available to make tradeoffs between selling and other activities. With a selling time audit, you will undoubtedly find ways to add leverage to your available selling time.