The Sales Quarterback

A recent article caught my attention at Growing Business, they’ve taken the time to peruse a Boots study regarding the ability to concentrate at work. It’s a British study, but while the situation might be slightly different in North America it still brings up some important questions. For example, unless you have your workers on commission, you’re paying your workers, on average “151 minutes per worker each day,” which is wasted due to tiredness, and these hours quickly add up. So what can you do to avoid this waste?

In a B2B world, your sales people are likely doing both lead generation and sales, which makes it very difficult to put them on a commission system – it is human nature to find any imbalances in the pay structure and to focus on the higher paying aspect. Even if you did try a commission system, you would have a lot of quirks to work out before it became a safe enough environment to satisfy the modern employee, especially if your sector doesn’t have a high client turnover. The other option is to cut an employees’ work days down to around 5 hours, but that much of a pay cut is not going to go over very well with your sales team either.

So what we’re left with is the idea that you would ultimately prefer to give someone a set amount of money for a set amount of sales, and not have to worry about the efficiency of the team working at it. That’s what made the article so interesting to us at Emotecomm – it’s what we do. The great thing about third-party lead generation is that it’s a contract with a reliable business; all of the details are worked out first, and you know exactly what you’re getting and what you’re paying from the start. It’s the difference between having your son clean your car and bringing it to a car wash. Only your son expects to be paid for chasing you around with the hose.

If you’ve noticed difficulties with your employees or your own concentration, or have any solutions that you’d like to discuss, feel free to post comments or send us an e-mail!

If you’re interested in more information about Emotecomm’s successes, check out the J.C. William’s Group Case Study in the Knowledge Centre.