The last decade has brought many changes to the sales profession, the internet, global competition and ever more demanding customers. This means you have to continuously look at new strategies for achieving sales success for your business.
Two key items you should keep in mind are the new sales roles the marketplace requires and how to compensate these new sales roles. Here is a quick list of the new sales roles:
1. End-User Specialist - This role focuses on creating demand from end-users, they learn in great detail the issues from an end-user prospective and work to meet their needs creating demand.
2. Retention Sales Specialist - Most companies get 80 to 90 percent of their revenue from existing customers making customer retention critical, focusing sales specialists in this role may be important.
3. New Customer Acquisition Specialists - This one is obvious, the focus is NEW customer development only, no account management.
4. Win-Back Specialist - This role specializes in winning back previously lost customers.
5. Telephone Account Managers - This role focuses on serving existing accounts and selling but do it all by telephone and electronic communication.
6. Service Consultants - 20-30 percent of most sales professionals time today is taking up performing service tasks, many companies are removing that effort and moving it to specialists.
Most of us probably fulfill these roles today but we lump them all into one sales individual and ask them to do it all. I think it is important that we at least consider what results specialization in our sales organizations might provide.
Of prime importance in implementing these new roles is how does the compensation structure work for each and as a whole and thereby enabling a cost-effective sales result. This can be complex stuff.
I am undertaking a sales organization redesign right now and one of the best resources I have found is a book titled, Compensating New Sales Roles
If your sales results are not what you want them to be, it might be the roles you have deployed and your compensation model. Something to think about.
