ROI of the field salesforce
Companies are continually asking themselves if they are spending
their money effectively and what Return on Investment
(ROI) each area of expenditure is achieving – and sales
& marketing investments must be included in this scrutiny.
Given finite resources, the decision to invest some of the sales
& marketing budget in a field sales operation must be compared
to a series of other options which should also deliver a measurable
benefit to the organisation.
Organisations must be able to compare the ROI of these different
options in order to optimise these investments
relative to one another – one key question which is often
asked is ‘How many sales people should we deploy?’
Behind the answer to this question must lie an understanding
of the point of diminishing marginal return which
can be derived from the sales force – in other words the
point at which an additional sales person will not add incremental
profit greater than the cost of that person.
Equally organisations may wonder what is the minimum
field sales investment which can be made before sales
revenue begins to suffer (even to the extent of having no salesforce
at all!), and how any savings gained may be re-allocated to other
areas of customer investment or brand building to counterbalance
any negative effects.
It is vital that the sales team is directed towards the channels,
customers & outlets which offer the greatest incremental potential,
& that their impact can be measured by comparing sales levels
before & after their interventions.
Meridian helps its clients answer these issues and other related
Sales Investment ROI questions, by helping them understand Sales
Processes, Best Practice, setting and measuring KPIs and combining
both hard and soft data to give Management insight into effective
deployment of scarce resource. Very often the necessary data is
already available in the organization – sales activity data
from in-house or third-party sales operations and Epos data from
retailer systems such as Asda Retail Link, Tesco TIE, Sainsbury’s
SID and Waitrose Connect – yet this information is not being
fully exploited.
To find out how you can benchmark your in-house or 3rd
party field operations against CPG best practice click
here
