Lori, the Sales Process Diva, brings up a couple of good points about lowering your SG&A, namely, using the phone more effectively and asking better qualifying questions of your customers. I agree that these are positive steps, but these are things that most major sales teams have down (I hope). Many sales teams could benefit significatnly from raising the bar on how they view which customers they will pursue and keep, and how they will go-to-market with their sales & service offerings.

More Profitable Face Time:
Instead of focusing on face-time with customers that merely have an interest in your product (as opposed to those who don’t because you didn’t ask them if they did), your sales management should be better focused on whether or not these customers are going to be profitable for you to take on. Moreover, each sales manager should be looking at his team’s book of business and ranking customers by profitability and trimming or shifting (more on that in a bit) an arbitrary percentage of bottom feeders on a regular basis.

The discipline to do this does not happen overnight. In fact, it’s a lot of hard work. However, when I’ve talked about managing your customers like a stock portfolio, this is exactly the type of action you can take with that level of discipline in your data. Further, you will start to develop certain predictors (SIC code, inflection points, management changes, regulatory influences, and the like) which predict how prospective customers might fit into a more profitable book of business for your team.

Bound By Channels:
Maybe your customers aren’t profitable because it’s costing you too much to service them through your direct sales force. Time that your field sales people spend on the phone is time away from customers, and it’s still costing you the same. If you really want to get sales people in front of the most profitable customers, a few changes are in order.

• Move prospecting, qualification, lead generation and appointment setting to an in house corporate channel
  
• Shift sales of a certain profitability metric or size of sale into channels with lower transaction costs
  
• Arm sales management with the appropriate tools to coach a sales team on how to seek out and retain the most profitable business for their channel
  
• Offload or outsource non-value-adding or non-value-enabling tasks from the sales force onto sales support teams.
  
• Diligently craft effective and thorough customer communication processes to ensure that sales people are always on target with their message and not explaining away the latest corporate disconnect.

These are but a few thoughts on fostering a culture of productivity and profitability within your sales organization.