How to Survey a Direct Selling Salesforce
What are they thinking? If you’re not asking this question about your salesforce, you should be!
While some of your representatives will share their concerns and compliments with you, most won’t. Unsolicited feedback is important, but you shouldn’t rely upon it as your only gauge of field attitudes.
A direct selling business is healthier when its independent representatives have positive attitudes about the company and its people, products, and income opportunity.
The actions that you take (and don’t take) as a company impact their attitudes and the success of their businesses. When attitudes become negative, sales and recruiting performance suffer, and so does your business.
The Purpose of Surveys
You need to know what your salesforce is thinking so that you can take action to address important issues. Surveys are conducted to learn what people think.
If you don’t ask the right questions, you won’t learn what you need to know.
12 Steps to Better Business Decisions
When you conduct good surveys of your salesforce, you can make better business decisions. Here are 12 steps to help you learn what your field is thinking.
- Start with clear objectives that identify what you wish to learn or verify.
- Design a survey that asks pertinent questions.
- Determine your selected method for data collection and your budget for research.
- Identify subgroups.
- Calculate the number of completed surveys you wish to obtain from your population (or from each of your subgroups, if you use them).
- Conduct a pre-test of the survey.
- Adjust the survey as needed. If the adjustments are significant, conduct another pre-test.
- Administer the full survey.
- Analyze, interpret, and report the results.
- Based on the information gathered, identify, prioritize and implement changes to the business as needed.
- Compare the pre and post-key operating indicators of your business to look for the impact on your company.
- Conduct another survey to determine if the attitudes of your salesforce have improved.
Sylvina Consulting offers a broad selection of services to established and emerging party plan and network marketing companies, one of which is building and conducting consultant surveys. Sylvina also reviews and designs compensation plans, analyzes key operating indicators, and evaluates and improves the performance of direct selling companies.
For more information, call 503.244.8787 or submit our information request form.