Interim Sales
What is driving the demand for interim sales people?
More and more companies are looking to interim sales people and managers to cost effectively help them through challenges such as:
- New market entry from established companies
- New product or service introduction
- Start ups
- Turn rounds
- Hard to fill vacancies
- Short term cover
The demand for consistent performing sales people is growing but supply is not. This is forcing up the cost of hiring and employing sales people be they good or just average. The average cost of a good sales person is around £120,000 per annum. This includes basic salary and bonus or commission of £100,000, NI costs of £13,000, a car or car allowance of £4,800 and pensions and health care. In the first year it can be at least £15,000 more to cover recruitment costs. Excluding recruitment costs this equates to £550 a day, and over £610 when recruitment costs are taken into account. Not quite premier league footballers' costs but definitely not insignificant.
Many of the activities above are more like projects than “permanent jobs”. There is no guarantee of success with start ups or new product introductions and that builds risk into the equation and as any good risk manager knows, risk equals more cost. It is not just market demand that is driving up the use of interim sales managers and sales people but is also the absolute cost and employment risks which are involved. But aren't interim people just as, or more expensive than full time employees? The answer is not necessarily. If you take into account the flexibility interims offer, the fact that they are generally more experienced and often overqualified, and that there are no hiring or “firing” fees, then even if you pay a premium the chances are you will be better off in either sales or total cost terms, and in some cases you could benefit from both.
Koru's approach to interim sales and sales management
Our people are all highly skilled, experienced and successful sales professionals. We make no distinction between those who carry out consulting assignments and those that do interim work; they are all sales practitioners who use same approach and methodologies and share the same values. Our specialisation is in project type work where we are given the responsibility to achieve the project's objectives. For this we quote a price, which could be fixed, day rate based, risk and reward or a combination. We then deploy the resource(s) required to meet that objective. If that is more than we planned the risk is ours and not our client's.