Gary Colleran, Sales interAction’s lead consultant, talks about the evidence of how SFE interventions can be better deployed and then made to work over time through coaching and ongoing support.

Transcript

Sustainability of SFE Interventions

The interventions that we can put in place to improve sales force effectiveness can be variable.  When you consider that they’re subject to the decay curve that we’re probably all familiar with, when you first carry out the intervention, it is likely that you’ll see a distinct change in behaviour in the short term.  Representatives will change, they’ll be behaving differently and operating differently.  But very soon after that, that behaviour reverts back to where it came from and you see behaviour fall back to the original… pretty much to the original baseline.  You’d hope for not to the original baseline, but it does decay back.

The elimination of the decay curve is really the function of the first line sales manager.  By the first line sales manager constantly going out with the sales representative, what you can do is boost the behaviour back up each time they go out on a visit.  So what we’re looking to do is eliminate that decay curve by constant reinforcement by the first line sales manager on a regular basis.

The factors that define whether or not the first line sales manager reinforcement’s going to be effective is their capabilities, such as: What is their understanding of the selling model?  What is their understanding of the campaign and its messages?  What are their observational skills like?  Can they accurately assess what the representative’s doing in the sales call?

And their coaching skills and all of these capabilities are subject to the same issues that we’re talking about with the sales representatives and their performance.  They need to be at a high level, and if they’re not at a high level that has implications in terms of how effective the first line sales manager can be.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the first line sales manager, and the implications of that decay curve, they are pretty much the same as they are for the sales representative.  So, unfortunately, unless we’re constantly revisiting the skills set of the first line sales manager, we can’t guarantee that their competence is going to be at the level we need it to.  So, somehow, we need to manufacture a system that, on a very regular basis, goes back to the first line sales manager and reinforces their skill levels at observation, messaging, skills of selling, and keep that at a very high, consistent level.