The idea of an effective sales program is to provide focus on your “plus” accounts. Those are the accounts with the most potential. Consider the following sales facts when building your sales initiative.

1. There aren’t many salesmen that handle twenty true premier accounts. By definition, a top account should be in your highest 10% ranking based on annual revenue, profit margin and potential.

2. Most accounts will not put 100% of their eggs in one basket.

3. Generally speaking, the total volume purchased by an account does not equal the S.A.M.  (Served Available Market) that you specifically can supply.

4. It is a fact that accounts have life cycles. You WILL lose some accounts for any number of reasons regardless of who you are or what you do. Lack of prospecting will eventually cause your territory to die a slow, painful death.

5. Vendor relations can suffer dramatically as your salesmen drive by an account while riding with a manufacturer’s representative explaining that he is not allowed to call on that account as it is not on his top twenty premier lists.

6. What does the salesman do with his spare time – since most accounts don’t want to see salesmen more than every couple of weeks? That means seeing twenty accounts every two weeks gives you an average of only two sales calls per day maximum

7. Salesmen get bored, creativity is suppressed and they even get angry when they have to incorporate too much administrative time into every one of their accounts. The kind of paperwork nightmare associated with this type of program can get out of hand. Unlike the T.L.S. (Tier Level Selling ™) program that differentiates each level of five accounts with regard to administrative time, this type of program requires identical, sophisticated tracking of every account and every activity. That answers the question of what the salesman does with his extra time. Paperwork. Paperwork that often requires trying to document what you don’t know you don’t know. GIVE ME A BREAK! I have actually seen that question listed as a requirement in a program of this nature.

From a management perspective, the goal of any sales initiative should be to improve the quantity and quality of the sales efforts of your salespeople. Its primary purpose is to provide focus, process and discipline that will enhance territory performance. This enhancement will lead to an increase in the sales, profitability and market share for each individual territory.

Rick Johnson, expert speaker, wholesale distribution’s “Leadership Strategist”, founder of CEO Strategist, LLC a firm that has helped hundreds of clients create and maintain competitive advantage. Need a speaker for your next event, E-mail rick@ceostrategist.com.  Don’t forget to check out the Lead Wolf Series that can help you put more profit into your business.

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