Measure sales team development by the orders salespeople take through to purchase without you negotiating: processing an order after your conversation with the customer does not yet show that the team can work independently. If salespeople took over your customers and kept their orders, you gained time, but the handover itself did not increase the company’s revenue.
In the first week of working with a company that sells goods with payment in instalments, our head of sales split the sales plan into two: one for the company and one for the department. The difference was noticeable. The head of the company personally closed some sales, and these amounts had previously been mixed together. Judging by the overall result, the team looked stronger than its own sales showed.
At the same meeting, the business owner asked whether his own head of sales could manage. Our head of sales suggested keeping him and training him, and assessing his readiness to lead the department by the figures. The owner agreed: “He wants to learn, he’s a hard worker.”
This is the difficulty development starts with. There is someone who is trusted, and there is money from customers. But the total alone cannot tell you what next task the department can handle. Raising its sales plan is easy. You will need to explain who will deliver the increase before hiring and taking on new costs.
Developing company sales
Developing a company’s sales includes both securing additional orders and handing sales over from the owner to the team. The handover does not in itself increase the company’s revenue: it changes who does the work. These goals therefore need different measures.
An owner has every right to want to keep the money coming in and stop handling customers personally. For an established business, this is a meaningful goal. It cannot be dismissed just because turnover has stayed the same. But the same handover cannot be promised to increase total revenue either.
| What happened | What changed for the company | How to assess the result |
|---|---|---|
| The owner’s customers started buying through salespeople | The team took over existing work | Orders and terms were preserved; the owner stopped conducting these negotiations |
| Salespeople secured orders that had not existed before | There was additional volume | The increase after deducting lost orders; the cost of securing it |
| The customer base was handed over from an experienced salesperson to a newcomer | Work was allocated differently | Customer retention and the workload of both employees |
| A customer ordered in advance what they had planned to buy later | Revenue moved between periods | Total volume across both periods, without promising the same money again |
This table is needed before discussing whether the head of sales is doing a good job. Otherwise, they will face incompatible demands: take over your customers, free up your time and present the entire amount handed over as new money for the business. The first two tasks can be done together. The third distorts the result.
To calculate growth, the head of sales first puts together the sales expected if nothing changes: current agreements, repeat orders and the usual flow of customers. They account for seasonal changes and customers who are known to be stopping their purchases. A large one-off order is not carried into a future period just because it looks good in a report.
A line for your figures: company sales plan minus expected sales if nothing changes = additional sales that need to be secured.
Next to it, a separate line: the value of existing sales to be handed over from the owner to the department. This amount counts towards the team’s future workload, but is not added to the company’s expected revenue a second time. The owner sees how much work will move to the team and how many sales still need to be added.
Make comparisons on the same basis: orders with orders, payments with payments. If the sales plan is based on money received, a contract with payment due next month does not meet it. The link between amounts and timing is discussed in the article on the sales plan.
Sales development strategies
Sales development strategies are chosen according to where the next orders should come from and what prevents them from being secured today. Handing over customers, addressing their next need, expanding a source of customers that already works and entering a new segment require different preparation.
Hand the existing sales volume over to the team. This approach is needed when the company makes sales through the owner’s constant involvement. First, the head of sales finds out exactly what depends on the owner: knowing the customer, discussing terms, choosing a solution or seeing negotiations through to the end. Simply changing the person responsible in the CRM system will not transfer either the agreements or the ability to hold the conversation. The result is preserved orders with less involvement from the owner; no additional revenue is attributed to this stage in advance.
Secure more orders from existing customers. The basis here is the customer’s next need: a repeat purchase, an additional product or a new task. A long list of phone numbers is no substitute for that basis. The head of sales identifies a group with a clear need and organises work with that group. If a customer has simply been sold something earlier than usual, you first need to see their total purchases across the previous and new periods. Otherwise, the department will report that money as growth and find itself short of it later.
Expand a source of new customers that already works. Advertising or an extra salesperson is justified when the path from enquiry to order is known and it is clear exactly what is missing. If salespeople are busy negotiating and have no time to take on suitable customers, more people are needed. If they are waiting for a technical calculation, another salesperson will send more requests to the same busy specialist. Both cases bring the same complaint — we cannot keep up with sales — but the money needs to be spent in different places.
Enter a new segment. Here, you need to find out why a different type of customer would choose the offer. You cannot immediately set the full revenue achieved by an experienced salesperson as the standard for someone who still needs to find these customers and understand their requirements. Before expanding permanently, the team needs to secure orders on terms the business is willing to repeat. The owner sets limits on the time and money for this attempt in advance.
There is no need to pursue all four approaches for an impressive sales plan. If the task for the coming period is to hand over the owner’s customers, increasing the flow from advertising at the same time will also give the same people unfamiliar customers to handle. The head of sales must explain who will handle both tasks and what work will be taken off them to make that possible.
Developing sales processes
Developing sales processes should allow the team to handle more deals without constant help from one person. To do this, the head of sales identifies a specific action that only the owner or the strongest salesperson currently performs, and teaches the others to do it within agreed limits.
When handing over customers, the trickiest point is the difference between who is named in the record and who took the negotiations through to a decision. If a salesperson processes an order after negotiations conducted by the owner, it is too early to credit them with a sale made independently. Otherwise, the report will show a successful handover before it has happened.
The head of sales can do this work without a new record-keeping system. For customers being handed over, three things are recorded: who conducted the negotiations, which issue brought the owner in and what the owner did. The sale counts once in the total. The owner’s involvement is recorded separately, so that one order is not split into arbitrary percentages of credit.
Next, the reason for involving the owner matters. The owner personally introduced a new salesperson to a long-standing customer — one action needed for the introduction. The owner again discussed standard terms because the salesperson could not explain the offer — a recurring dependence. In the first case, the head of sales needs to arrange an introduction. In the second, they need to go through the specific conversation with the salesperson and practise the response.
Some decisions also require the owner because of their cost: changing terms for a major customer or taking on a new commitment for the business. These cannot be counted as a failed handover. Otherwise, salespeople will have a reason to hide such issues to score well for independence. The sales plan separates these decisions from ordinary negotiations in advance.
The owner does not need to listen to conversations and compile notes personally. The head of sales shows which orders the team handled on its own, where help was needed and which reason keeps recurring. This distinction shows where to invest: in training for a specific action, access to information or changing the approval process. Demanding that they “be more independent” does not help you make that choice.
Sales plan for team development
A sales plan for team development links the company’s goal, the team’s task, the first change and the conditions for the next investment. For handing over customers, the criteria are preserved orders and a reduction in the owner’s routine work; for growth, they are additional purchases at an acceptable cost.
The template below is filled in by the head of sales. It helps the owner approve one upcoming stage as a whole, including workload and costs, rather than separate requests to pay for hiring, advertising and training.
| Sales plan item | What it should contain |
|---|---|
| Stage goal | Additional orders / handover of existing customers / both tasks recorded separately |
| Starting volume | Total company sales over a comparable period in roubles; sales involving the owner over the same period in roubles |
| The team’s work | Which customers and actions move to the department; which existing work remains |
| First change | What is getting in the way now; what the head of sales changes; who carries it out |
| Resources | Amount of one-off costs in roubles; amount of monthly costs in roubles; staff time available |
| Timing and decision | Start date; assessment date; result needed to continue; reason to stop |
1. Gather the starting data. The head of sales can be given the next three working days to prepare the calculation and list what the team depends on. This is the time allowed to prepare for a decision. If the records do not allow the team’s sales to be separated, the first result will be a list of missing data and a way to get it. Inflating the sales plan without knowing the starting point is pointless.
2. Select a group of customers for the first change. For a handover, choose customers with clear needs and standard terms so that the team learns through work it can later repeat. Existing orders and agreements must be preserved. At the same time, account for workload: customers handed over will take up time even with zero increase in total revenue.
3. Set a time frame based on the customer’s path. For a new flow of customers, allow the full time from first contact to order; for repeat purchases, the usual interval between them. One deal successfully handed over does not yet answer the question of how the customer will place the next order. The assessment date is tied to that event, and completion of preparatory actions is tracked from the start.
4. Calculate the next cost after seeing the result. Keeping orders with less involvement from the owner provides a basis for handing over the next group. New orders on suitable terms justify expanding that method of attracting customers. If the owner repeatedly steps in for the same action, the head of sales first removes that dependence. Adding customers will increase the amount of the same unfinished work.
To assess the cost of the stage, add the one-off costs to the monthly costs multiplied by the duration in months. Add to this amount any commitments that would remain if the work stopped. If advertising and a new salesperson are put to work on the same flow of customers, their costs are added together, while future orders are counted once.
When development becomes the owner’s work again
If the owner personally investigates the reasons for repeated interventions, trains salespeople and reworks the sales plan, they are still running the department. Even after handing over a customer, what they get in return is the daily work of managing the people they handed that customer to.
Here, you need someone who sees the chosen change through and adjusts the team’s actions based on the results. At RENTROP, turnkey sales management means handing over the daily management of an existing department so that the owner stops being its main head of sales.
In the story with the two sales plans, the agreement was to keep and train the client’s head of sales, and to assess his readiness to lead the department by the figures. “Hard worker” now came with a specific requirement. The assessment could now separate the team’s work from the owner’s personal sales: his help was no longer to serve as proof that the department was already managing on its own.