Q: We are currently reviewing some sales procedures for our department. We have a director, two account executives, an assistant and my position - I handle all marketing, website development, contact management database, sales contracts, promotional pieces, new curriculum investigation, etc. The following questions arose from our discussions: 1. How many contacts/sales calls should contract training account executives make each week? Each month? Is there an average target number that you have seen across our industry? 2. Who typically does the prospecting and cold calling for potential clients? Salesperson or back office? 3. Are incentives typically offered to sales staff? For cold calling? For reaching sales goals? Monetary vs. Non-monetary? Our account executives are salaried and we don't have any incentive program currently in place, although a commission structure has been talked about from time to time. In your June webinar, I believe that you gave a statistic that an experienced salesperson should be able to sell 6-20 x their salary, with 10-20 being the average. We are trying to do all we can to boost sales, but it's a constant struggle. Any thoughts or input you would like to share would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.
A: The number of sales calls would depend on the income you'd like to generate. We use the average dollar value per contract and the historical number of contracts (usually going back 3 years)--those kinds of data--and we calculate number of calls needed based on that data and the close rate--a ratio of calls to contracts closed. Long story short, again, it depends on the amount of income you need to generate. It would be unreasonable to make an independent target since a tiny department in North Dakota would not perform like one downtown Chicago.
I would have sales people doing prospecting. I can imagine another scenario, but only a very mature, well-coordinated and cross-trained department that's been up and successful for several years. Back office generally runs operations, so the sales people can hand off a contract once it's been signed and operations can "make it go."
Typically incentives are not offered. There are exceptions. I would recommend incentives start when a salesperson is generating more than 10 times their gross salary, benefits excluded in revenues, since this range of productivity falls within what is usually expected from salary and benefits.
The benchmark I quoted was 6-12 times their salary. This really requires a number of things to be in place, as I mentioned: operational support, full time sales staff and so on.
Everything that you need to know to run a successful Contract Training Department is presented in Contract Training Institute. Have any of your people taken that? I'd love to come to Plano and deliver one. In an in-house training, we can completely customize it to your specific department. It offers a certification exam--though its optional. If you're interested, I can send you some information on that.
To get maximum income from sales staff, they need to be trained in both sales and in client analysis, so they're working in the right way with the right people. That's one of my favorite things to help people with. It's exciting to figure out "where your gold is" and exciting to go get it!