Marketing Communications

Download free eBooks at bookboon.com

Marketing Communications
Personified Promotion

EVALUATION OF SALES FORCE PERFORMANCE

•    The task of managing a sales force should include the job of evaluating the efforts of the

sales people. Until executives know what their sales force is doing, they are not in a position

to make constructive proposals for improvement. Performance evaluation is essential for

various reasons.

•    Performance analysis can assist sales manager in improving efforts or contributions from

individual salesperson.

•    Performance evaluation can aid in determining training programme content, sales force

supervision and pin-pointing specific strengths and weaknesses of the sales force.

•    Performance evaluation can assist management to decide compensation packages and

promotion for the sales force.

•    Performance evaluation should be based on quantitative and qualitative factors.

QUANTITATIVE BASES: sales performance should be evaluated on the basis of input or efforts such
as indicated by call rate, non-selling activities, product demonstration and so on. It should be evaluated
on the basis of output result as measured by achieved sales volume, gross margin, and so on.

Some output-result factors that ordinarily are quite useful as evaluation bases are:

1. Sales volume – by products, customer groups territory and so on.


2. Sales volume as a percentage of quota or territorial potential.


3. Gross margin by product line, customer group and so on.


4. Orders – number, average size in monetary terms, batting average or orders divided by calls.


5. Accounts – percentage of accounts sold, number of new accounts called on and sold.

Some useful input – effort factors to measure are:

1. Calls per day or call rate


2. Direct selling expense, as a percentage of sales volume or expense quota.


3. Non selling activities such advertising displays set up and number of training sessions held
   with dealer and distributors.

A successful evaluation programme should appraise the sales person’s performance on as many different
bases as possible to avoid a misleading evaluation. For example, a high daily call rate appears good, but
it tells the management nothing about how many orders per call are being written up.