Sales Force Design Management Consulting
Lantern Capital Advisors proudly partners with a Vistage group chair in order to provide Sales Force Design Management Consulting services to our hight growth clients. With over 20-years in the trenches, we have acquired the skills and experiences to understand the differences and dependencies on great Sales Force Design, as the pre-requisite to Great Sales Force Management & Performance. We Take the Guess Work Out of Whether Your Sales Force Will Deliver The Promised Revenue.
Raising Capital from investors typically also Raises Expectations on the Sales Force. While your Sales Force may have historically Made-Plan, the stakes are probably going to be much higher in the Strategic Growth Plan that Lantern Capital Advisors will develop with you. Promised Revenue is much more rigorous than what you may have called Planned Revenue (or Quotas) in the past.
Historical Work with Sales Forces
We have designed sales forces where there was no sales force. We have done this with both low-tech tools, and with more-tech tools. We have consolidated acquired sales forces into a single force with all of the inter-personal implications. We have done missionary selling (invading white-space) to open new territories and markets, trained sales forces, implemented cross-selling strategies, designed and administered compensation plans and managed regional and national sales forces as executive VP’s. In the process, we have personally made over 5,000 sales calls.
With over 20-years in the trenches, we have acquired the skills and experiences to understand the differences and dependencies on great Sales Force Design, as the pre-requisite to Great Sales Force Management & Performance. While we could act as consultants and do it for you, we will be your Chief Sales Force Coach. You will end up with a great Design, A Great Sales Force and self-reliance by not being dependent on perpetual sales force effectiveness consultants.
Bad Paradigms
Typically we find companies heavily engaged in Sales Force Management activities. Sales Force Design is not part of the vocabulary. The higher-education system bears some responsibility. Marketing Majors graduate from college without even taking Personal Selling 101. And even if they took it, there is little curriculum devoted to Designing a Sales Force. As their careers evolve, sales professionals become sales force leaders and attempt to manage the poorly designed sales forces they inherited. It makes some sense because Designing is Analytical Work, and, Sales Professionals are typically People-people.
So we typically find clients treating Sales Force compensation as a sales management task. Properly done however, sales compensation is a critical Sales Force Design task. This usually leads to a paradigm that the Sales Manager should always make more money than the best sales person; we particularly like to work with sales forces that include that in the existing paradigm.
Quotas. They are typically the tombstones that mark the agonizing path when poor design leads to poor individual or group performance. And how did Quotas become the Plan; typically by adding 9.574 % to last years Quotas or Actual Results, whichever is higher; sound familiar?
The Implications of Skipping Sales Force Design
The first is that it makes Sales force management much harder than it needs to be. As an example, Management won’t have the “battlefield analysis” in hand to show the sales force what the true business potential is in their territory. This leads to needless energy going into debates over the fairness of Quotas (there’s that word again).
The second implication of skipping sales force design is that it usually leaves too many holes in your sales force coverage where the enemy can invade your vulnerable accounts, while your crew is driving right past great “suspects” that are not in their Contact Management System.
The Sales Force Effectiveness Industry
Since we did our first higher-tech Design Project for LABOR READY in 1994, the consulting industry has created an industry around increasing the effectiveness of the sales & service function. Some of this has been driven by a plethora of software advances in contact management, market research, compensation and GIS mapping.
Some Consultants have decided to be specialist in compensation, contact management or customer relations management or Sales Training. Others are generalists across various components of Design & Management. Many are sole practitioners; some bring in a team of specialists. Most do the work while the Client observes. And the work goes on through several phases. Some have the scale to handle international projects; others focus on US regional and national markets.
Our Sales Force Design Approach
From nearly 22 years of Sales Force and market development work, we have chosen to do, for our Consulting Clients, what we have done as a VISTAGE executive coach for a group of 14 CEOs; we put technical skills, tools, our process and your team together with our street-smart intuition. The result is a best-practices Sales Force Design, competent Management process and a high-level of self-reliance on your part.
We will work together to Take The Guess- Work Out of Whether Your Sales Force Will Deliver…The Promised Revenue.
