Traditionally within a direct sales organisation all sales calls have been seen as a field based activity with the major emphasis on individual sales people to organise their own working week. Leads from exhibitions, incoming rep to call requests and any customer services queries have been passed to the field but not always followed up either from the field or the office. It is difficult to gather meaningful data on how effective marketing campaigns have been, whilst we can quantify what the response has been to a specific marketing action i.e. direct mail shot or exhibition it is not as easy to quantify what deliverable was gained with the respondent.

The effectiveness of a sales department can be undermined if the individual salesmen cannot book enough quality sales calls. Conversely, booking sales calls is the most important of all sales activities as well as being the most difficult. It is a popular misconception that the "sale" is the hardest part of the sales persons job when in fact it is more difficult to find someone with a need or application, than it is to sell to him when you have found him. It is also important to note that it does not always follow that an individual who cannot book calls is a poor salesman. Conversely it should not be assumed that good salesmen are good at booking calls.

Within the ISS sales process all areas of the selling process have been assessed and modifications to how calls are booked and who has authorisation to book them have been made. Our target is nominally 16 appointments per week per salesperson within the conservative B2B market (it may be that specific industries can do up to 8 calls per day within smaller areas). All calls will be monitored via the ISS software to check strike rates (quotes to orders) and call to quote ratios (number of calls required to generate a quote) to make sure we do not increase our calls into non-useful areas.

A traditional average working week for a salesperson in UK industry is as follows.

4 days on the road, 3 calls per day, 1 day at home booking calls preparing quotes etc.

In a sales team of 4 direct sales we can easily see the following :

I.e. 4 X 3 = 12 (Per person) X 4 (salesperson) = 48

Our target call rates utilising our new systems are:

4 X 4 = 16 (Per person) X 4 (Salesperson) = 64

These call rates are very generic and will be customised to suit your application and particular sales cycle.

It is possible to increase your existing sales call rates by at least 25%. Utilising the territory management and appointment planning elements of the ISS sales process reduces time wastage within the sales process and allows process improvement in key areas.

Please see the sales process schematic for information.