Just as all audits, a sales audit is as analytical and comprehensive as it is definitive. Using this type of evaluation can assist you in your plans for improving your sales performance. Sales audits are performed by a sales auditor, who can be retained or who works within a company.
Reviewing and Auditing Your Sales Employees
When it comes to auditing, you can break down the process into three categories. Auditing involves reviewing the sales skills of employees as well as the types of sales documents used. It also entails the types of approaches used. For example, when it comes to auditing your sales staff, you need to evaluate the following:
- Verbal or Communicative Skills: How well does each salesperson speak with customers or prospects?
- Organization and Planning: How do salespeople spend their working hours?
- Knowledge of the Industry: How do salespeople understand the current market with respect to competition and the latest trends?
- Product and Service Knowledge: Do salespeople really know the services or products that they sell? Do they understand the features, benefits, technologies, or purposes involved with the services or products?
- Current Sales Offers and Promotions: How well do your salespeople know how to use the offers that are made available?
- Knowledge of Target Customers or Prospects: Do your salespeople really understand the profiles of their leads and customers?
- Understanding of Customer Loyalty: Do your salespeople understand how loyal customers have shaped your company in terms of prosperity?
- Understanding of the Company’s Mission and Policies: Do your salespeople apply your company’s ideology to the art of selling?
Auditing the Paperwork
When it comes to auditing sales documentation, whether paper or electronic, an evaluation can assist you in seeing how each form contributes to information retrieval and retention.
Evaluating the Sales Approaches Used
Sales approaches are also regarded with respect to the following:
- Retention of customers
- Customer satisfaction
- Exits of customers
- Follow-ups
- The efficiency of addressing customer claims
As you can see, an audit can be revealing in terms of employee performance, paperwork, and sales strategies. That is why it is essential that you make this type of assessment a part of your regular protocol. By retaining this type of information, you can see where to make improvements and where to increase your efforts in sales and marketing.
How You Can Benefit From the Information
If you do not have this type of information at your disposal, it can be hard to efficiently plan and organize sales operations. By conducting an audit, you can create a plan to strengthen and improve your lead management process including routing, qualification, lead capturing, scoring, and database segmenting. You can also develop a content strategy to balance out your sales and marketing messaging, thereby capitalizing on your competitor’s weaknesses and your value proposition simultaneously.
A sales audit can also reveal ways for you to improve on your sales strategy digitally. For example, an audit can assist you in choosing the appropriate automation, such as lead management software and a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. When you use an audit to improve and increase sales, you can see a notable boost in performance in about ten weeks.
A Sales audit is the first step in making your sales process a science vs. an art. Only few companies have expertise in doing this. You should always seek objective, professional help once you plan on auditing your existing sales processes.