As an owner of a SME manufacturing business, I’m sure you’ve asked yourself this question many times over.

Reality is, most manufacturers rely on repeat business and word of mouth so it’s a totally valid thought to ponder especially as right now your sales team are probably out there hanging with existing customers keeping them feeling loved. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you’d like to think your sales team are kicking down doors and swinging new clients into your business on a regular basis.

There are four positions where you may be asking this question from right now:

You don’t have even a single dedicated salesperson, but wondering whether you should have one.

You have one but don’t know if they justify their own existence?

You’re thinking about adding more?

You’re wondering if you can do more with the ones you have?

I’m going to give you some thoughts on each one, that may help you validate whatever action you think you need to take. Careful though, the answer lies in a gray area of “it depends”, but there are some definitive attributes that will help frame some direction. Read on….

Scenario 1 – No dedicated salesperson. Doing fine without … I think?

The first scenario is that of a SME manufacturer that does not have a dedicated salesperson. This is typical for young organizations just getting their footing and finding their way. In many cases, the president of the company is fulfilling this role because since the beginning their primary responsibility has been bringing in new business.

This organizational structure is fine for a while and serves multiple positive outcomes in the short term.

First, its cost-effective to not be saddled with this cost before you’ve actually manufactured or sold anything and allows investment in the production aspects of the business to drive healthy margins.

Second, it allows the president to remain intimately familiar with the company’s prospects and customers, as well as any customer service issues that may arise so that issues can be handled immediately and with one voice.

This is all fine and well in the beginning, however, anybody that’s ever run a business knows how many hats you are forced to wear on a daily basis and how much of a constraint or bottleneck that can be to the businesses’ ability to scale beyond this one person’s capacity.

With success and growth come volume and complexity and thus a reduction in the president’s ability to do any one of these many tasks well, or even at a marginal level. As the old saying goes “jack of all trades, master of none.” This is a drain on the entire organization’s ability to sustain growth.

So, in these instances, it is advisable to critically look at the items on the president’s plate and determine which activities are essential for them to do themselves, ensure they have the capacity to do them well, and look to delegate other activities to put people in roles where they can focus maximizing their performance amongst a smaller set of responsibilities, thus removing overall bottlenecks in the process.

Other Scenarios – Do I need more salespeople? Am I getting my money’s worth with the ones I’ve got?

The next set of scenarios are somewhat similar, but nuanced, and based on the premise that you have at least one salesperson on staff. You may be wondering the following:

You have one but don’t know if they justify their own existence?

You’re thinking about adding more?

You’re wondering if you can do more with the ones you have?

Perhaps a more important question is: What information you have at your disposal to make logical conclusions to the answers above?

If you have one salesperson, but don’t know if they justify their own existence, how do you answer this question? If you are like many of the manufacturers we see, this is simply a “gut feel” without any supporting data besides sales numbers.

Now I’m not one to tell a successful Entrepreneur to not rely on their gut instincts, because in more cases than not they were one of the critical factors to even being in a position to have the problem of deciding to add a salesperson or not. However, all businesses should seek to make decisions based on information (which is data that has been compiled to deliver insight) and only after all available information has been considered and the decision is still not crystal clear should the notion of instinct come into the decision making process.

The questions that should be being asked at this point are the following:

• How do I determine whether the individual is performing at a high-level?
• Based on related operational costs, what amount of Sales do they need to bring in to break even on their position?
• Can I get more out of them? Are they working at capacity?
• The answers to these questions may vary from company to company, but the information that is used to answer them is consistent.

Do you have visibility into this information in your organization? Can you get it at a moment’s notice, or are you having to add cost to the equation to employ someone to compile this information? Or worse, are you tying up your own capacity in aggregating and organizing this information to make these decisions when your time could certainly be used on other value add activities?

While the ultimate answer to the question as to whether or not you need a Salesperson or whether or not you need to add Salespeople depends wholly on the individual characteristics of your organization and the information discussed above, the one constant is that your organization must have capabilities in place to collect, organize and report on this information to give you the business leader the insights you need to make an informed decision that is more accurate than your “gut instincts”.

The first step along this path is typically the introduction of a CRM system in your organization. However, a CRM itself is not a panacea. It is simply a tool that can be used to assist in this endeavor. The CRM must be configured and molded to encompass your organizations unique characteristics and drive the type of dashboards and KPI’s that your specific business utilizes to support decision making.

Get the constraint out of your sales team

It is far better to have the constraint in production than sales, as production capacity is much easier to grow than sales. Having the correct systems and processes in place to give you valuable insights into your sales organization’s performance relative to resource capacity and revenue is a step in the direction of achieving this goal.