At many car dealerships, money leaks out through sales! Not through high discounting of cars but inefficient and incompetent working sales teams cost the dealers loads of money. That sounds rather like a bold statement but it is unfortunately the reality of every day. For answering this question: “How much effort are salespeople going to put into acquiring new customers?” , shows a huge leak in the way many car dealers handle the use of salespeople.
On LinkedIn, people could join in on the question about the number of phone calls a company would need to maintain sales. This was the starting point of the question:
Suppose brand dealer -x- sells 450 new cars every year.
How many phone calls to new customers (=prospects) will salespeople need per day to guarantee this number annually?
More than 15 phone calls a day is the most common answer given. At first, that seems to be correct. Most surprisingly, 10% has no idea how much effort is required. In short it is clear is that there seems to be no single answer to this question.
To do the math right, one important fact must be included. Namely, uWhat kind of people does the sales team consist of? Unfortunately, many car companies do not invest enough in the quality of their sales teams. As a result, large level differences are often seen within this group of salespeople. This is too often the ratio: a few top performers, many middle performers and a few who are better at another profession.
Research among salespeople has shown that 39% of salespeople indicate that they have difficulty making acquisitions. If we assume that for the sale of 450 cars and everything that comes with it, we have a team of 3 people, this automatically means that at least 1 salesperson is bad at making acquisitions. That was the salesman who would be better off choosing another profession but can stay because the job market is so bad.
Because of this one bad salesperson, the other 2 have to start putting in extra effort to compensate for the number of missed or non-executed acquisition calls. They have to 66% more effort. Note 39% means that there is therefore also a colleague who can do quite well but is not an outlier. In other words, the top performer on this team is punished with extra work because the employer allows incompetence within the sales team. The question is how long this top salesperson is willing to put in extra effort to compensate for the work of his colleagues. And at what point does he begin to give less energy and adjust his level of work to that of his colleagues.
When an employer is willing to invest in staff through training and coaching they can build a top team. After all, when a team consists of top salespeople, they only need 9 acquisition phone calls to achieve the desired number of 450 cars. So the question is not whether it is smart to invest in staff but when will you invest and prevent any more money from leaking away through sales!
In fact, research has shown that employees appreciate their employers more when they invest in their people. Companies that do this also see a lower turnover of workers. So employers stop the leak and start building a top team of salespeople!
Do you also want to build a top team? Let's meet so I can map out what it takes to do this!
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