Does lateness of your sales people cost you money?

This interesting article about options for handling staff who continually arrive ate for work on Sydney Morning Herald small business pages made me think about how do you monitor and manage your sales team when they are late.

I'm not just talking about being late on arrival at work in the morning. For many people in a sales role they don't have to check in at their desk at the same time every day like other people in the office might.

Latness can easily go unnoticed.

Lateness for sales people can be:

* Late for meetings
* Late with submitting reports
* Late for returning phone calls
* Late for responding to client requests
* Late with submitting expenses
* Late with providing input or ideas when requested
* As well as being late to start in the morning (but this may go unnoticed if they are in the field)

The SMH article talked about lateness as a sign of lack of commitment and possible attitudinal or behavoural problems. Or maybe even problems in their personal life.

This raises the importance of staying tuned-in to your sales team and understanding their individual motivations. When signs of lateness (or lack of commitment) appear you can start to ask... Why?