Growing your sales force too quickly can lead to wasted time, and money. Have you thought about the size of your sales force lately?
If you grow your sales force too quickly it can be a huge problem. For starters, you may not have the expertise to manage it, and there may not be an established market or sales process in place for them to follow—leading to wasted time and money. It can also lead to frustration and disenchantment, which sooner or later morphs into high turnover.
On the flip side, if your sales force is too small you won’t close all of the sales opportunities that could have been yours with the proper staffing. In these situations, your current sales force will feel overworked, underappreciated and under-compensated. Corners will be cut. Performance will suffer.
Have you thought about the size of your sales force lately? Is it too big or too small? How are you supposed to know?
The workload method
The workload method is a relatively simple way to determine the size of your company’s sales force:
Step 1
Organize your potential customers into categories based on expected level of effort to manage them. Perhaps your company sells to consumers, small businesses and large businesses. The variance in effort required to close a sale for each type of customer warrants that each one be placed in its own category.
Step 2
For each category, estimate the length of the sales cycle, amount of salesperson time, intensity and travel required to manage a potential customer throughout the entire sales cycle.
Step 3
Based on these estimates, determine the aggregate salesperson time required for each category and across all categories.
Step 4
Estimate the amount of time that each salesperson has available. Assume that all sales people will have an equal amount of time available (50 hours per week for example).
Step 5
Divide the total amount of time required for all of your sales prospects by the amount of time available on average per sales person. The result is the number of sales people you should have in your sales force at a given point in time.
