I work for a tiny consultancy with a niche - but great - product. I've been able to significantly increase sales, to the point where we've had to grow our implementation team from 1 subject matter expert (SME) to 3.5 (the 0.5er is becoming full time soon).
For our flagship service, an SME dedicating their time to a project can complete a work order as little as 4 hours or maybe up to 15 hours - but on average about 8 hours. However, SMEs have a lot of other stuff going on, which means I think it would be reasonable to ask for 2 work order completions per week per SME.
I've noticed we've had quite a backlog these days, so I finally looked into it. Not only does my CSM show 30+ work orders in backlog, but I have 40 more incoming.
I set the expectation during the sales cycle that it would take about 6-8 weeks to fulfill the work order. Historically, we've had ups and downs in volume, but we're usually able to exceed those timelines, although I will say that we've had fairly regular occurrences where the work is backed up 10 weeks or even 12, which makes me uncomfortable.
Well - I've looked into the current backlog and the work being produced in the past several months. It turns out we are only completing less than 3 work orders per week for the entire team of 3 full timers and 1 part timer (in fact, the part timer has been more productive than the full timers, even though he's much newer).
The math ain't mathin' - this means that for the 70+ work orders averaging we have a 25 week backlog, vs the 6-8 weeks that we tell customers.
I've asked leadership about this repeatedly and they say they're going to address the issue, but there are no immediate changes. The CEO is going to start going into the planning meetings... but that got delayed two weeks due to her scheduling.
What would you do in my (a salesperson's) shoes?
Poll is up but I'd also welcome suggestions.
P.S. No, I won't quit - the money's pretty good and I've got it pretty good in my silo at this company.
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