India's sales effectiveness lowest in Asia-Pacific region

India needs to significantly improve its performance when it comes to sales effectiveness, as it is far behind its peers in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region in terms of engagement of the sales force with a particular brand, a survey said.

According to the survey, commissioned by performance improvement solutions provider Grass Roots Group, there is a greater opportunity for improvement across all aspects of sales effectiveness in India compared to its regional counterparts.

"India's overall sales effectiveness rated significantly below the regional average. Tremendous opportunity exists for stronger engagement between the brand and the front line sales team within the reseller environment," Grass Roots India Managing Director, Charoo Aggarwal, said.

"There is no one issue which India's brand managers and retail managers must fix to ensure overall excellence in sales effectiveness — it is going to take a holistic approach of engagement tools, communication, learning and motivators which will improve the overall sales behaviour," Aggarwal added.

The country has performed fairly low, compared to the regional average and China in specific, when it came to providing personal or anecdotal information in support of the brand recommendation made by the sales person.

India's sales force performance in these terms is just 18 per cent as compared to the regional average of 22 per cent, while China's average was 21 per cent.

Moreover, the knowledge of Indian sales staff about after sales product support was also among the poorest in the entire region and merely 39 per cent used that knowledge as a selling point.

This clearly signifies that the resellers need to be better engaged with the brand, the report added.

Besides, sales staff lost the opportunity to close sale as they did not ask shoppers if they would like to purchase the product.

The report revealed that an opportunity exists for sales people to be better equipped in ascertaining a deeper understanding of customers' history and criteria with regard to previous brand experience and timing of purchase.

Although this ranked slightly ahead of the regional average, sales staff negated this in determining other key information such as budget limitations and the intended use of the product which was the subject of the enquiry.

In India, though, the first part of listening carefully to the customer has been out performed standing at 95 per cent, only 41 per cent were able to establish the needs by asking the right questions.