One of the first things for turnaround a sales department is to know what the people profile is. So I would suggest the following classification: Farmers, Hunters, and Soldiers.
Sales department staff classification: Farmers, Hunters, and Soldiers.
A few common mistakes in sales departments regarding staff profile
- Not having Farmers: So not having customer loyalty strategy or not properly implemented.
- Having Farmers but manage everybody as Hunters or Soldiers: In this case probably we are not taking advantage of the specific Body of Knowledge (BOK) for Account Management.
- Not having Soldiers: This is deciding to “not pilot our sales”. I mean leave leads generation just on marketing actions could be a risky decision. Because we do not decide specifically the customers in which we are interested, we just wait passively to receive customers’ requests that could come from an interesting customer for the firm, or not. Likely, many customers searching for bargains will approach us. Moreover, some customers could not be approach our company because there is a misunderstanding about our market positioning. For instance, customers that could think that our company is too big to be interested in their business while those customers have enough size for us. Be aware that without Soldiers the company cannot create a Territory Plan, and companies without a Territory Plan manage the present rather than the present and future of sales.
- Having more than one sales type, but managing all of them just according to one type: People profile and even salary must be different for each sales type mentioned, so we are managing wrongly all of them in the same way (“coffee for everybody strategy”).