Sales Effectiveness Health Check · 10 min · free
Where does your sales force honestly stand?
Most owners find out how their sales force really works when the best rep leaves with the top accounts. Ten minutes shows it first.
Start the check now →No email before your result · no sales call after
- LaggingThe sales manager is the best rep with a bigger territory and a title, and manages the team in whatever time is left over.
- BasicThe manager has been taken off most of their own accounts, and runs the team from reports and email rather than alongside the reps.
- CompetentThe manager's job is written down as coaching, planning, reviewing and removing obstacles, and their own account load is capped so they can do it.
- AdvancedManagers spend most of their week with reps and customers rather than in head office, and the span is small enough that every rep gets time each month.
- LeadingManagers are chosen for managing rather than promoted for selling, and the last one appointed was trained for the job before taking it.
What the check covers
About twenty-five practices across five dimensions, one screen each. Pick the sentence that is true today.
Where the selling effort goes
Who the reps call on, how many reps there are, what a patch is worth, and what the sales force costs.
How the selling week is spent
Where the selling week actually goes, and whether a call has a purpose and a next step.
Managing the sales force
What the sales managers do, whether anyone coaches on a real call, and how targets are set.
Measures, pay and motivation
What reps are measured on, and what the bonus actually pays for.
People, skills and tools
How reps are hired, trained and equipped, and whether the good ones stay.
Ask your leadership team too. Set up a team poll: each colleague answers alone, and you see where your views differ.
Sample report · your profile
What you get
Your profile
Stage names across every area.
Two or three moves
Each one step right, with what good looks like.
A one-page PDF
Written to put in front of your board, leadership or team.
Four questions
How long does it take?
About ten minutes. One dimension per screen, and you can stop and come back.
Who sees my answers?
You. In a team poll with individual answers visible, the person who set it up also sees each answer against level and function, never a name. Only anonymised figures go into benchmarks. A comparison appears only once enough similar businesses have taken the check.
Is this advice?
No. It is a self-assessment against practices built from more than 30 years of strategy consulting and over 1,000 engagements. What you do with it is yours.
What happens after?
Your report opens on screen as soon as you finish, with no email asked for. If you want a copy, there is a field on the report to send yourself the link, once. Nobody calls. If you want to talk, there is a button on your report; nobody will contact you otherwise. No email before your result, no sales call after it, no list, and delete on request.
More about this check
A sales force is the most expensive thing most businesses own that nobody measures. Reps call on the customers they have always called on. The week goes on quotes and deliveries. The manager is the best rep with a bigger territory, and the commission plan pays for whatever closed. None of that shows up in the accounts as a problem: it shows up as a flat year nobody can explain. This check asks what your sales force is managed on, and what it is merely employed to do.
What the check covers
Sentences you can check:
Each of these is the lowest of five sentences on its question, from how the practice goes wrong to how it goes well. If one of them is true of your business, the check says so. Then it shows you the next sentence up: what one step better looks like.
What you get
Your profile across the five dimensions in stage names, not scores. The pattern you match, if you match one. The two or three moves that take you one step right, each with what good looks like. A one-page version written to be put in front of your board, your leadership or your team.
Two things the check does not do. It does not measure your results: sales depend on the market, the product and the customers as much as on the sales force. What is scored here is the machinery: how the sales force is run. No one person in it is being scored.
Start the check
One check, for any business that sells through people; field reps, account managers, territory salespeople and the managers who run them. Five short questions come first:
- whether you are answering for one business or a group
- roughly how big it is
- how you cover your customers
- how many people sell for you
- whether salespeople you do not employ, such as distributors, agents, resellers or an outsourced sales force, sell a material share of what you make. A business with no salespeople of its own will get little from it. It is also less suited for a business whose commercial life is one big negotiation a year.
Ten minutes. Private. Your report on screen.
Two minutes first? Try the five-question version.