Without making any new hires, do you know how to find the human resources you need to execute the growth plans that came out of your strategic planning session?
Start by determining how much time your sales team actually spends on selling. Project management, administrative follow-up, and billing are all important aspects of converting sales into revenue. They do not, however, directly bring in new customers and business.
In a strategic planning meeting with a client, we determined that less than 20% of their sales team’s time was spent in direct contact with prospects and customers. Through a process of strategic delegation of tasks, they were able to increase the time spent selling to over 40 percent. That’s equivalent to doubling the size of the sales team, without having to recruit or train a single new sales rep!
I’ve recently published two articles outlining this concept. To learn more about strategic delegation, see a short article available at IndustryWeek Online. A more detailed article is available in the Spring Issue of Wiley Periodicals’ Employment Relations Today.
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