Do each of your sales supervisors have their own dedicated relief rep? We’re guessing they do.
When asked about their preference, every sales supervisor in the country prefers having their own dedicated sales relief person because they want to control the tasking and allocations of their relief person. This means using the relief rep to do miscellaneous tasks when they aren’t running relief, many of which are tasks the sales rep should have done in the first place.
THERE ARE 3 MAIN PROBLEMS WITH EACH SALES SUPERVISOR HAVING THEIR OWN SALES RELIEF REP.
1 // EXCESS CAPACITY
When sales supervisors have their own dedicated sales relief person, the sales relief person usually spends less than half their time on sales relief.
If a sales supervisor has 5 reps and they each have 4 weeks of sick and vacation time, that equals 20 weeks of relief needed. Assuming the sales relief rep has 4 weeks of sick and vacation time, this means the relief rep has 48 weeks available to run relief. But only 20 weeks of relief are needed. That leaves 28 weeks of excess capacity (i.e. gopher time) to do miscellaneous tasks
2 // EXTRA HEADCOUNT
In the model where each sales supervisor has their own dedicated sales relief person, is having more sales relief personnel than needed the best use of the extra manpower? We don’t think so.
Using the above example, if 5 sales supervisors each have their own relief person (5 relief total), then 3 relief people should be able to cover 90% of the relief needs. This company is carrying 2 extra full-time people than they need. Would these extra headcounts be better utilized to add sales routes and give reps more time or to have the freed-up sales relief reps be moved to permanent reset support personnel?
3 // HIGH-VALUE WORK IS NOT ALWAYS PRIORITIZED
When the relief support resides in each sales supervisor’s team, no one has complete oversight of how all the relief personnel are being used.
For example: Today, one sales supervisor may use their relief rep to drop off buckets at accounts, pick up checks, and make a hot-shot delivery (i.e., C-level work). Meanwhile, on the same day, another supervisor has two reps out sick. This supervisor needs two relief reps to cover the routes (A-level work). Without two relief reps, the second sales supervisor will need to run one of the sales routes themselves instead of working with, training, and supervising the other sales reps on their team.
Centralizing sales relief and other sales support personnel is needed to:
✔️ Capitalize on excess capacity
✔️ Free up headcount
✔️ Ensure that A, B, and C-level work is being done with the correct resources
✔️ Improve the amount of time sales supervisors have to do supervisory work