How to Give 2 Hours a Month Back to Reps

How to Give 2 Hours a Month Back to Reps:

“I don’t have time for another one of these! I’ve got to be in-front of my customer!”

Have you heard that from your sales force lately? Maybe someone’s even said it today. The “these” referenced above are the multiple internal tugs at a sales force’s time…things such as meetings, surveys, reviews and trainings that internal partners hold.

Why are these things so problematic? Because time spent fulfilling internal company requests is time NOT spent selling.

So how do you ensure that the sales force has time to achieve its primary objective of selling while still meeting the demand of valuable internal requests?

We profiled an organization that tackled this challenge head on…Schneider Electric (one of the world’s largest manufacturers of equipment for electrical distribution and industrial control and automation) came up with a pretty straight-forward solution: they put a communications screening process in place.

Schneider no longer lets requesters go directly to sales reps or managers with their asks, but rather, the Schneider calendar team screens the requests to 1) identify the value of it and 2) manage the time investment for it.

The Schneider screening process requires internal functions to provide a business case to the sales calendar team, deferring communication submissions that don’t have tangible business value. On the back end, the sales calendar team actively enforces the time caps on the approved requests and manages any overages month to month.

Not only can this help identify the most valuable activities for sales reps to attend or take part in, but it also takes the screening task off of managers’ plates, removing at least one “resource allocation” activity from them. (In fact, our recent manager research found that these “resource allocation” activities are not the greatest levers in driving manager effectiveness, but that selling, coaching, and sales innovation are greater drivers of manager success.)

So, what results did Schneider Electric see with this communications screening process?

• A decrease in overall volume of requests
• 2 hours per month “returned” to reps
• An increase in customer-facing time by 11%

SEC Members, learn more about how Schneider Electric created and implemented this communications screening process. You can also listen to our webinar replay featuring this best practice.

In the future, rather than hearing “I don’t have time for another one of these”, maybe you’ll be hearing “I used one of those valuable activities to close another deal in the pipeline.”