Tips to Lower Your Selling Costs
by Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA)
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- Ask your sales reps to confirm appointments and meeting dates beforehand via e-mail or by telephone.
- Increase customer contact by having your inside sales or customer service representatives call customers on a regularly scheduled basis.
- Integrate direct mail and telephone sales as a means of making better use of your field sales reps.
- Equip your salespeople with wireless pagers, PDAs and other devices so they can remain in touch and communicate with customers while on the road.
- Arrange with your IT staff to set up remote access capability for your sales reps to allow them to access internal data on customers.
- Install a “1-888” number for your company and feature it prominently on all direct mail, voicemail and other company literature.
- Purchase a “block” of monthly minutes (e.g. 10,000) from a cellular service provider and set all of your reps on the service
- Re-evaluate territories with a view towards reducing territory size but increasing the product line.
- Consider adopting videoconferencing and other technologies as alternative options to a face-to-face meeting with clients and to save on travel costs.
- Budget for expenses carefully rather than have unlimited reimbursement.
- Invest in training your salespeople on how to save time and plan their routes/visits to clients—you’ll save on travel.
- Send fewer salespeople to exhibits and trade shows.
- Carefully review expense reports.
- Set per diem rates for meals and accommodation expenses in major cities or frequent destinations.
- Encourage your salespeople to plan their travel in advance to take advantage of discounted fares.
- Educate your salespeople to consider what they will need for a particular trip (e.g. a full-service hotel offering all the amenities vs. a moderately priced hotel with limited amenities).
- Request your salespeople to use off-airport parking lots which are cheaper and furnish shuttle service to terminals.
- Encourage your salespeople to cancel unnecessary hotel reservations prior to 6:00 p.m. local hotel time to avoid “no-show” charges being billed to the company credit card.
- Secure corporate travel rates on air travel, accommodations and automobile rental.
- Provide reps with a company calling card.
- Create a travel expense policy.
- Set up your expense report in an Excel spreadsheet format and distribute it to your reps so they can save time by filling it before returning to the office.
- Determine which option is more beneficial to your company —supplying a company owned/leased vehicle for each of your salespeople or reimbursing your salespeople for the use of their own vehicles.
- Examine your company’s insurance policy and see whether your salespeople are covered while driving a rental car. You may be able to avoid paying the rental company additional daily rates for insurance.
- Decline the refueling charge option on automobile rentals unless you expect to use a full tank of gas.
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 The Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA) is a national association comprised of nearly 30,000 business travellers in the sales and marketing professions. CPSA members enjoy special rates on hotels, car rentals, airport parking, insurance, and much more.
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