In the early 1980s, I had a vision of having three additional kitchen/bath showrooms in Connecticut, each in different urban/suburban markets spaced about 45 to 60 minutes apart.

By operating four locations, I could realize substantial revenue growth so my firm would (1) become more important to key cabinet vendors, (2) achieve certain economies of scale and centralized efficiencies in advertising, bookkeeping, purchasing, warehousing, trucking, etc., and (3) earn a bigger owner’s salary for me and a bigger bottom line for my firm. Indeed, I believed it was possible to earn a 14-16% pretax net profit on each of the satellite showrooms.

Developing Salespeople

To accomplish this vision, my strategic plan called for recruiting, training, mentoring and motivating three to four sales designers for each showroom. I opted to develop these sales designers “from scratch” because my experience in hiring from within the industry had not been successful.

Up until then, I had discovered the best hires from competitors were really nothing more than order-takers with design credentials who complained our pricing was too high for them to reach their sales goals. In short, they came to the job “with baggage,” and tried to convert my firm to the cabinet lines and gross profit margins they were comfortable selling.

So I created an intense, five-week adult evening educational course with eight to 14 students per class. Each student was pre-screened for suitability to our sales design profession, and the students knew up front there might only be one or two jobs available at the program’s end. While the investment of time was considerable for both parties, the program proved to be both effective and valuable.

Students didn’t have to risk their current jobs to determine whether the kitchen/bath design profession was something they would find satisfying. We could track, through class participation and homework proficiency, who would be the best candidate(s) for hiring. Without any bad habits coming into the organization, we could inculcate these “newbies” with our profitable ways of doing business and our corporate culture.

The Sales Analysis System

Feeling good about the quality of sales designers I was attracting to our business, I looked to the industry for sales management courses and tools to sharpen my leadership skills. Sadly, I found little available, a condition that still largely exists today.

There are plenty of good design courses and plenty of good selling courses. However, there aren’t a lot of good industry-specific sales/personnel management courses. So, again, I decided to develop something for myself that would prove helpful both for these fledging sales designers in pursuit of sales, and for me to monitor their progress.

Prepared monthly by me as the sales manager, the Sales Analysis System was designed to provide comparative data on each salesperson’s activity and results as measured by a sales plan created for them up front. I would then meet with each of the 14 sales designers once a month for approximately 1-1/2 hours each to review their leads and their Sales Analysis Record.

The system provided me with a critical performance basis for either stimulating additional sales or giving the individual sales designer more training.

This system was developed because of my belief that people needed reasonable goals to realize their full potential. For this reason, each sales designer in the organization had a mutually agreed upon annual sales objective on which they signed off. Using 10 years worth of corporate “sales order” history, I developed the average percentage of newly written sales per month. For example, January typically delivered 4.4% of our annual sales orders, February 6.7%, and March 8.3%.

I then took a sales designer’s mutually agreed upon annual sales goal, say of $825,000, and broke it down into realistic monthly goals using the firm’s historical monthly percentages. So, in order to remain on track to realize the $825,000 annual sales goal, a sales designer would need to close $36,300 of new business in January, $55,275 in February, and $68,475 in March. Taking an $825,000 annual sales goal, and dividing it by 12 months to generate a $68,750 monthly sales goal, seemed too simplistic when I knew the business wasn’t going to come in evenly in the real world.

The Sales Analysis Record for each sales designer was the central tracking tool of the Sales Analysis System to post the sales plan goals per month versus the actual results per month. Therefore, the headings of the Sales Analysis Record were as follows: Objective # of Leads; Actual # of Leads; % of Lead Goal Achieved; # of Retainers; Retainer % (of Leads); Objective # of Sales; Actual # of Sales; Closing % (of Leads); Objective Sales Volume; Actual Sales Volume; % of Sales Goal Achieved; Average Sale in $; and Sales Volume per Lead. Today, Excel spreadsheets and networked computers would make it infinitely easier to track this information than the way it was done in the 1980s.

Developing a Sales Contest

There was another, equally important value generated by the Sales Analysis System – competition. Since we had 14 sales designers with varying years of selling experience, varying levels of individual motivation and varying annual sales objectives, we could use the Sales Analysis System to conduct a monthly sales contest.

All of the sales designers competed against each other based upon the % of monthly sales goal achieved. In this way, “newbies” with a $450,000 sales objective could still compete with an eight-year veteran having a $1,300,000 sales objective. As a result, we recognized the winners, and spiffed them cash prizes at monthly sales meetings, which were held in the main office from 6-9 p.m. on the first Tuesday evening after the close of the month. Incidentally, each sales meeting covered one or more important training topics, either on selling techniques or new product information – or both.

In conclusion, retaining motivated, productive salespeople in this industry has always been a difficult assignment at best. The Sales Analysis System proved to be a powerful data management tool that helped me develop a team of highly effective sales professionals.