“Success in sales is the result of discipline, dedication, and sacrifice.” ~ Thomas Roy Cromwell
Discipline in sales is defined by the first call time, total retailing time, no of total calls, beat coverage, outlet coverage, and journey plan adherence. And It will be the story of sacrifice if the right discipline is not established.
In our last blog, we discussed why you should focus on market discipline even though you are achieving your sales targets. Market discipline is one of the main challenges CPG companies are currently facing. Due to lack of market discipline, your beat coverage, sales team productivity suffers. In this blog, we will discuss the right way of establishing market discipline.
As it is said, Motivation keeps you going, but discipline keeps you growing ~ John C Maxwell.
The leaders in the industry have figured out the key to this problem statement of establishing the right discipline in the market and have been practicing it top to bottom approach to achieve this milestone. In the field of sales, the salesperson and his Manager are like Jai-Veeru of Sholay, and to meet the numbers on field both Jai and Veeru have to be disciplined. The belief is that if the middle management is disciplined, they will establish the discipline within their field sales team as well.
The hierarchy of sales is just like the Indian Politics, where CEO/MD/National Sales Head is like the PM, Middle managers are the Cabinet Ministers, Sales Reps are MPs handling constituencies. PM can’t talk to each MP every time, but the cabinet ministers can do the same day in day out. It becomes essential that our Middle Management is disciplined and set the right examples in front of the field sales team.
Quantify Manager’s working:
Sales is the field of numbers. It’s always easy to define numbers for the one whose direct KRA is order booking, but when it comes to managers, there is still a grey area.
To start with, it’s crucial to identify the right role and responsibilities of middle management and quantify their contribution to the field sales.
Middle management contributes broadly in the following ways.
- Independent Sales
- Manager Working
- Joint Working
Independent Sales
Quantifying their independent sales will give visibility of their contribution to primary and secondary sales independently. Hence total order booked value should be the right KPI to monitor.
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Manager Working
One of the main part of their job is to visit the distributor, search for new distributors, search for new stockists, and to promote new products in the market. Hence no. of distributor visit, Distributor activity time should be monitored.
Joint Working
When the Manager goes to retailing with his SR, his joint efforts should be monitored. Quantifying Manager’s working in the field can add strategic value to sales decisions and help in establishing the market discipline.
Once you have the right system to quantify your middle management’s working, you can monitor their impact on your primary and secondary sales. Also, this will help you in establishing the right discipline in your team. Once middle management is aware of the monitoring of their working, they will become more sincere and will drive the field sales proactively.
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