Sales business targets approach

In one of our clients in South America we observed that without procedural errors, the lack of organization, order and planning, the wrong approach to sales business targets could cause sales loss.

When entering our client’s stores, the portfolio was located in the store according to its typology, finding each type of product organized in a specific area. Each area had one or more sellers depending on the size of the store, so when a customer entered and went to a certain area, a specialized salesperson would attend them. Each seller had a monthly sales objective, which was transformed into a bonus. Every team member made an effort to sell looking to achieve their individual objective and therefore, their financial compensation.

Analyzing this strategy, we saw that sales could be lost when a client was also interested in a product from a different area, as the salesperson had no interest in selling a product from another section, and did not advise or serve the client properly. To fix this, we proposed to implement sales benefits at group level in addition to the individual ones, so a good individual performance will promote the whole team performance.

On the other hand, these objectives were assessed in a monthly basis, which discouraged sellers who were too far to reach the target as they were in the middle of the month. and made them somehow stop working on the remaining sales since they would no longer achieve the proposed objective and therefore its financial compensation. To solve this, we proposed to set weekly sales goals and each salesperson could reset the counter each week to do their best throughout the month.

This learning has application in any area of ​​the company and shows us the importance of a global vision rather than analysing it separately, where it’s possible to have a better individual result but a worse global performance.