In today’s competitive business environment organizations are striving to increase their revenues with reduced Cost of Sales. Cost of Sales can be impacted by various parameters – one of the major contributors to Cost of Sales is cost incurred while running an In-Store Sales Executive Program. Within an In-Store Sales Executive program the main contributor of cost is salary of the Sales Executive. Thus it is important to offset this cost by extracting optimum productivity from the Sales Executives. Primarily this can be achieved by placing right Sales Executive in right store to realize the true potential of the store.
It is a fact that different stores will have different business potential depending on the footfall and footfall can be result of various inputs like location of the store, offers, product availability, marketing, visibility, after sales service etc. Similarly, in an In-store Sales Executive Program not all the Sales Executives will be of same quality in terms of their ability to drive sales. Now it is important for a brand to address this fact and place the right Sales Executive in the right store.
To achieve the above objective, we have to first create an evaluation metric to rank the existing Sales Executive in terms of their ability to perform. An evaluation metric can be made based on various parameters depending on the priorities’ set by the brand. Few common parameters used across brands are:
- Supervisor Feedback: To evaluate the behavioural nature of the Sales Executive e.g. Relationship with store manager & peers, customer focus, initiative & productivity etc.
- Tenure of the Sales Executive in the Program: To evaluate the loyalty of the Sales Executive towards the program
- Reporting Compliance: To evaluate the discipline of the Sales Executive in terms of daily reporting of attendance, sales, stock etc.
- Grooming Score: To evaluate the grooming standards e.g. whether he/she is wearing uniform, the condition of the uniform, well combed hair, maintained/well shaved beard etc.
- Past Performance: To evaluate the target achievement in the past
Different weightage can be assigned to all these parameters basis the focus of the brand.
Once all Sales Executives are assigned ranks basis the evaluation metric, they will be assigned to the stores basis the rankings i.e. better ranked Sales Executives to be placed at high potential stores and lower ranked Sales Executives to be moved to low potential stores to realise the true potential of the stores.
The above exercise will also lead to –
- Compensating Sales Executive basis their true potential:
Taking count from the above exercise it is important to evaluate the salaries offered to the Sales Executives to ensure salaries are optimally designed, especially for the cases where a Sales executive is ranked lower and moved to a low potential store. Salaries of the Sales Executives who are highly paid and low in ranking, thus moved to low potential stores to be revised to match the targeted Cost of Sales.
- Retaining the better Sales Executives in the system:
In the above process we might see certain percentage of attrition but in the larger picture this is good for overall health of the program as better Sales executives will be retained by factoring in the fact of non-performance due to lack of potential of the store leading to high Cost of Sales. In this scenario the Sales Executive can be transferred to a different store with better business potential.
We shall discuss other ways to curtail Cost of Sales in an In-store Sales Executive Program in coming insight. if you like what you read and want us to help you with Sales Staffing Solutions, please leave an inquiry through the form in this link https://www.channelplay.in/india/sales-force-outsourcing
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