Franchisees: Build an Awesome Sales Team

If you want to build a really strong franchise business and you just cannot do all the sales yourself, you will have to eventually hand over the sales wheel to a sales team. This entails plenty of training, finding the right people…the list goes on. Well, here is how to do it right!

Evaluating Your Sales Force

Evaluating your sales force is an important step in the process of deciding whether or not as well as how to grow your sales team. If your existing sales force is fine and will be more than adequate to fuel future growth, you still might require some additional training or perhaps a restored reward package. Perhaps your sales force does need to improve and grow, or you may choose to stay the same size but have different people filling the sales positions.

The first step in evaluating your sales force is to decide what you want it to do for you. Perhaps you want your sales force to handle only the larger accounts or perhaps you see your sales force as the only outward manifestation of the company seen by customers meaning they have to carry a heavy load and always uphold the franchise’s image. Whatever the case, you need to decide exactly what function they must play in your franchise business. It will not require a lot of thought for you to come up with a good description of what you want your sales force to do.

However, make sure you’re not evaluating your sales force based on some other company’s needs. Once you decide what jobs your sales force is intended for, simply check their performance against the requirements. The key measure when it comes to evaluating a sales force is sales productivity.

Measuring Sales Productivity

The simplest measure of sales productivity is the dollar amount of sales per salesperson. You can do this by dividing the volume of sales by the number of salespeople on staff. That will give you an average sales productivity figure and give you an idea of how the average salesperson in your franchise is doing. However, it is more useful to know how each individual salesperson is doing compared to the average. You may find that you have a handful of relatively productive people who are carrying the load for a few underperformers. This is the kind of information you need to know in order to decide whether to make a change or not.

However, sales productivity may involve more than simply generating dollars of sales. You could find that your sales force is moving a lot of product now but costing you sales later by alienating customers with poor service. They may be making promises you cannot deliver on, overburdening your production and shipping departments. Therefore, check to see if certain salespeople have large numbers of returns or tend to sell to customers who do not pass credit checks. These salespeople could be costing you more than they are actually worth.

Hiring Salespeople

Adding salespeople can result in progressively increasing sales. This can free you up to spend time and energy on other tasks. On the other hand, hiring salespeople could also hurt sales, erode profits, damage valuable customer relationships, and destroy your image in the marketplace. The key difference? It all depends on whether you hire the right salespeople or the wrong ones.

Salespeople are not just the people responsible for building your bottom line in your franchise. They are also the ones with the most daily contact with your customers. With that caution in mind, it is very important to not only grow your sales force, but to grow it properly.

To hire the right salesperson for the job, you have to understand and be able to describe what the job is. That involves clarifying whether this sales position is intended to immediately generate sales or perhaps develop contacts for a sales cycle that may stretch into months or years. Do you want a salesperson who is a closer or one who takes more of a consultative approach with customers? Matching your company’s sales needs and selling style to your new hires is the first step in getting good salespeople.

Misunderstanding your company’s compensation package is one of the main reasons for sales staff dissatisfaction and turnover. Therefore, for all potential new hires, explain precisely what the compensation plan is. In addition, clarify the territory, your performance expectations, any training you will offer, and any sales tools you will provide. Describe the market and the competition.

Try imagining the ideal salesperson for the job, including his or her personality, experience, energy level, reputation and abilities. Now, you may not find someone exactly like that, but if you do not know what you want, you most probably will make a bad hiring decision.

Before sending three-line ads and calling the classified department of your local newspaper, consider some other options in finding the ideal salesperson for your franchise:

Look internally: you may find that you have technical, support, operations or administrative people who would and could successfully move into sales. Post the ad on a bulletin board and see what happens.

Ask for employee referrals: Your existing employees may know the kind of people who would be happy working for you and may be able to suggest some people for you to contact.

Network with suppliers, customers, colleagues, advisors and social contacts: This can be cheaper, faster and more reliable than advertising to the general public.

Check with professional associations: They may have job lines to help members find employees.

Try online advertising: this is attractive for both candidates and employers as it is faster, fresher and there is a greater searchability.

Check with your local college: You may be able to hire a recent graduate who’s enthusiastic, effective and less expensive than a seasoned professional.

When you know what you want and what kind of person will be an ideal salesperson for your franchise, you will be able to identify him or her immediately. The growth and success of your franchise depends on the right salespeople involved!

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