Effective Sales People

The best way to make a sales person effective is:

1. Assign weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual goals.

2. Make each sales person account for their time by day each week.

3. Ask for a weekly status report for new clients, existing clients and target potential clients to be visited.

4. Have a good incentive or commission program that is "win - win" for both the salesperson and the company and that they can not cheat. If the sales people are cheating, change the program.

5. Commissions should be "paid on paid" meaning that the sales person earns their commission when the customer pays their invoice in full.

6. There always should be new customer goals because a sales person can land a big account and sit fat and happy for a long while. After the first year, all commissions should be reduced for existing accounts. New accounts should earn a higher commission. The goal is for the sales staff to focus on winning new accounts ("hunters") while customer service people ("farmers") take care of the existing accounts.

7. Call a weekly sales meeting every Friday afternoon to go over the past weekly activity. Normally in many companies, you can find the sales people on the first tee on the golf course right after lunch on Fridays! If one of your sales people have a five handicap, you know that you have a problem!