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The title might look strange but there is a background to this one. I was providing consulting service to one of the companies in the Agriculture industry. I was defining the targets and introducing them to the process of Annual Operating Plan (AOP). Whenever we talked about setting the challenging targets, the voice was unanimous, If it rains, we will be able to achieve the target. I asked the Sales Head “How do we differentiate between achievement due to good rains and achievement due to the efforts of sales person?” He said this is the challenge that he is facing in terms of measuring the performance of each sales team member and bringing internal parity. It was almost sounding like the sales achievement is “act of god”.
Measuring the sales achievement is a very easy task since the revenue or unit numbers speak for themselves. It is critical to quantify some of the parameters that lead to achievement of sales. My question to the Sales Head was assuming that it rains well, what determines whether we sell well or not. In other words, what are the activities that help us sell well and is there a way to quantify these activities and prepare a dashboard?
If we have to sell well during sowing time or when farmer is taking a decision on purchase of the product, we would have done lot of activities that would positively influence the process of farmers purchase. What are those activities? For a farmer “seeing is believing”. If we can define and quantify the activity of reaching out a targeted number of farmers much before he takes the decision. We can look at the number of villages reached where there is sound evidence created based on the results of last season.
Creating a dashboard of activities that lead us to achieving our sales target and measuring the progress against the plan would help us in reducing the impact of “act of god”.Else it is easy for the sales team to blame god since he is invisible !!!!! Converting the sales target into the activities target by week/month/quarter might help in making sure that there is correlation between the aspiration and the efforts. Measuring the effort with the help of quantified parameters and the dashboard would also help the managers in picking up the early signals of lethargy, laxity, complacency…etc on the part of the sales team.An Excel based tool might always help in defining the dashboard and monitoring it.