Sales Per Employee Ranking Reveals Surprising In-plant Leaders

In December, we ranked the largest in-plants by sales and employees. Now we’ve taken that data and calculated the sales per employee for each of those operations — and the results are surprising.

Several in-plants that ranked lower on our other two lists have leapt to the top of our sales-per-employee list, a sign that size is not the only impressive feature of a leading in-plant. Though Allstate’s in-plant topped last year's list with an impressive $431,369 in sales for each of its 367 employees, this year the in-plant dropped to fourth (with $414,291 in sales per employee) to make way for a new leader. Navy Federal Credit Union generates an impressive $875,000 for each of its 16 employees, based on the $14 million in annual sales reported to us. After that, OGE Energy Corp. came in second with $663,996 in sales per employee, followed by Farmers Insurance with $416,955 in sales per employee.

Other top ranking in-plants on the list include the City and County of San Francisco, the State of Montana, Western & Southern Financial Group, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, HealthSouth and the State of Colorado. Each makes more than $280,000 in sales for each in-plant employee.

Though consultants like Howie Fenton of IMG have noted that sales per employee is not always an accurate indication of an in-plant’s performance (benchmarking against similar operations, he says, is a more revealing option), we present these results for your general information, not as an indicator of one in-plant’s loftier position over another. For truly, if an in-plant with a high sales-per-employee number is not proving its value to its parent organization, it may still find itself in trouble.

Our sales per employee ranking will be published in an upcoming issue, however we’re making it available early online. This special report is available free of charge by clicking the link below. We ask only that you fill out a very short registration form to help our research efforts. This data is helping us better serve the market with relevant content. Once you register, you will not be asked for this information next time we publish a special report as long as you use the same browser. Click here to see our sales per employee ranking.