Customer Strategist Yucel Ersoz: Striking a Balance When Sizing Your Sales Force
The quintessential question of every organization's sales force strategy is deceptively simple: How many reps does the company need to hire? A sales force sizing strategy can help when determining the optimal sales capacity needed to properly service the marketplace.
Companies, however, are under increasing pressure to reduce the cost of sales, which leads to a tendency to undersize sales forces. Undersized sales forces may appear to deliver targeted profitability results in the short run, but in the long run they cause the company to forego shareholder value because potential growth in territories and client areas are overlooked and competition snatches it instead.
Sales force sizing, therefore, should strike a balance between immediate profitability and long-term growth.
Companies, however, are under increasing pressure to reduce the cost of sales, which leads to a tendency to undersize sales forces. Undersized sales forces may appear to deliver targeted profitability results in the short run, but in the long run they cause the company to forego shareholder value because potential growth in territories and client areas are overlooked and competition snatches it instead.
Sales force sizing, therefore, should strike a balance between immediate profitability and long-term growth.
