Evaluating your current sales force is an important step in the process of deciding whether and how to grow your sales team. If your existing sales force is fine and will be more than adequate to fuel future growth, you can keep the number of people the same and simply add some additional training or perhaps a revamped compensation package. On the other hand, your sales force may need to grow by a few heads, or you may choose to stay the same size but have different people filling the sales positions.
Step one in evaluating your sales force is to decide what you want it to do for you. For some companies that do most of their selling through mail order or the Internet, a sales force is strictly an option. In this case, you may expect your sales force to handle only the larger accounts, leaving the smaller orders to customer service personnel and order-takers. For other companies, however, the salesperson is the most visible-and perhaps the only--outward manifestation of the company seen by customers. This type of salesperson carries a heavy load. He or she has to uphold the company's image, hold the customers' hands, interface with delivery and repair departments at headquarters, and, of course, get the sale.
It won't require a lot of thought for you to come up with a good description of what you want your sales force to do. Make sure you're not evaluating your sales force based on some other company's needs. For instance, if your salespeople are primarily charged with following up on leads generated by your advertising, don't penalize them if they aren't making a lot of cold calls. Once you decide what jobs your sales force is intended for, simply check their performance against the requirements. The key measure when it comes to evaluating a sales force is sales productivity.
The simplest measure of sales productivity is the dollar amount of sales per salesperson.