Portrait of Effective Seller

CleverControl Inc. investigated office behavior of the best sales managers

CleverControl Inc. - an employee monitoring systems developer - has conducted a research regarding the behavior of the best sales managers and compared them with the group average. The company got the idea when one of the customers - a major insurance company - asked CleverControl to review the performance of all staff members (which is about 500 people). Analysis was done manually using several characteristics. For example, the amount of time the most productive employees (sales people, whose sales average was 30% higher than the rest of the group) spend working with mail was studied. Also the amount of time they spend working with internal applications and so on.

This resulted in compilation of a curious portrait of the effective sales manager who beats the target by 30%. For example, a productive seller sends and receives 25% more emails and responds to emails at least 40% quicker than an average seller. For 80% of emails response time is within 10 minutes, while an average manager responds to only 55% of all emails in the first 10 minutes. In addition, effective sales managers have 15% more different external contacts collected from e-mails, chats, and forums, and 5% more internal contacts within the company.

Sales “champions” spend more time working with office applications (20% more on average in the group) and in general spend more time on active work on their computer.

CleverControl analysts have also discovered that online activity of effective sales managers only 2% lower than the average for the group, but they spent 30 % less time on social networks and entertainment sites (such as YouTube), thus their Internet activity is more related to the search and analysis of information for the job.

Finally, beating the target cannot be done without overtime. In particular, productive managers are 10% more likely to stay late in the office than their average counterparts. But CleverControl’s hypothesis that best sellers accumulate and create more documents was not confirmed.

Still some HR consultants reckon that not all of these comparison criteria can be considered valid. Emails can be long but contain a lot of filler text, and responses can be quick but thoughtless. In addition, the same criteria in different companies may be assessed differently. For instance, in companies where the democratic management style is used, which encourages the independence of people and there are no numerous approvals procedure in place, a large number of letters cannot testify as a sign of high productivity. On top of this, these types of comparisons may create conflicts in the work team. If an employee affects the statistics with highly productive work, he or she may earn executive’s respect but not colleagues’ affection.

That being said, the criteria chosen for analysis can be and should be customized for each company and to avoid conflicts executives may not share results with employees. But in any case, such analysis will become a great asset for improving business processes and employee training.