Where in the past decade flexible sales was a bit frowned upon by sales professionals it matches today's vision on the way to combine work and life. Many highly skilled sales, marketers, revenue specialists and service managers are preferring a 6 to 18 month mission with a motivating challenge and a motivating remuneration, to joining an organisation and a business culture for a longer period.
Using temporary and flexible sales teams in B2B selling has become a strategic approach for many companies looking to enhance their sales performance without the long-term commitment and overhead costs associated with permanent staff.
By thinking about sales as a role, rather than as a function, and by reflecting carefully on the added value of sales teams over time, smarter decisions on commercial development can be made.
Operating a temporary and flexible sales team brings a number of benefits to any organisation:
For relatively simple sales campaigns where in-depth understanding of the business is not a key requirement and where the value proposition and the selling process can be relatively easily trained, specialist organisations can provide qualified and motivated resources.
In more complex B2B-sales environments where understanding specific technology, understanding the industry and the market dynamics at play, bringing-in temporary sales profiles with a proven track record brings three additional benefits:
Conditions for success
To turn the engagement of highly qualified temporary sales resources into a success a number of conditions need to be met:
Alignment with the incumbent organisation
Depending on the specific mission of the temporary sales person, or temporary sales team, a closer integration and a closer match with the incumbent sales organisation may be required or may be omitted.
In many cases the role of temporary sales is to bring in long lasting customers that afterwards need to be serviced and developed by the standing organisation.
To avoid dissonance between the customer experience in the acquisition phase and in the delivery phase congruence in service attitude, company culture demonstrated, ways of working and tone of voice, will need to be established.
Equitable Quid Pro Quo
As to renumeration a number of elements are at play. A temporary role will always require a premium remuneration to cater for the lack of long term perspectives and long term employment comfort.
An interesting element to consider is the Customer Lifetime Value versus the Customer Acquisition Cost (for the Revenue Architecture enthusiasts CLV on CAC 🙂).
Not all businesses need ongoing growth or business development, so once a next level in customer base expansion has been achieved, the focus will move from new business to growing existing business.
If in these companies the cost of customer acquisition is not cut in time, it will become a fixed cost without any significant income generating component.
In practice, business development rainmakers often move into account management positions for which they are not suited. Often this role is not a match with their personality and does not give them a lot of job satisfaction. Other, more suitable account development profiles would yield much better results in the account development than the end of cycle business developer, farming bored, and untriggered on already developed accounts.
Providing a commission and achievement bonus that reflects this situation correctly is a challenge.
This requires an equitable quid pro quo attitude from the engaging party, where there is an agreement that sharing in long term profits is not a bad business practice that deprives shareholders from well deserved income.
In practice a non-capped commission that can be double of what is normally offered to sales people on guaranteed sales revenue for the first year is applied. Depending on the revenue predictability of the business this may be on IFRS Recognised Sales Revenue, on average Customer Lifetime Value for the first year or on any combination of the above.
In some industries, where accounts need to mature and where sales volumes and project stages require a longer build-up, the initial commission on acquisition is often combined with a follow-through commission on sales achieved with developed customers in the second and third year that is paid to the temporary sales, who at that moment is already at work to grow another company.
Happy do discuss.
I am looking forward to getting your take on working with flexible sales forces and on conditions for success that you have nailed for this particularly agile form of sales development.