Although I often look at customer engagement process as a lynch pin to optimizing the sales force, there are many other factors. One of my clients recently conducted a time use study and discovered that their primary field force personnel categorized themselves and spending 21-24% of their time in administrative tasks. Everyone understood that was too much, and the temptation was to simply tell people to do that less.
When we looked into it further, however, we found that the overwhelming portion of those “administrative tasks” consisted of communicating by and processing email. The teams worked very hard to work together, and we found that people were in constant communication all the time, but the result of that was an avalanche of email. That more nuanced insight has led to a careful look at the technologies the company can employ.
Filed under: Field Sales, Sales Force Effectiveness
