A Case Study On Sales Office Reorganisation

Are you familiar with the sales office which, because its staff are low paid and have had little - if any - sales training, simply processes orders? Many companies still have such a sales office. However, the cost pressures in sales mean such companies need to increase the efficiency of their organisations. One way they can do this is to transfer active sales tasks to the sales office. There are problems, but also great benefits, of doing this as this case study on the experiences of a Sales Manager describes.

The Sales Manager's first task was in moving the sales service staff from being simple "order processors" to being active salespeople. He achieved this by delivering a programme of comprehensive sales training sessions. The subjects covered in the training workshops included telephone-sales methods, finding new customers and team work. Whilst the sales training was being delivered the service department was also restructured, so that its role in active sales was made clear. In practice this meant that every customer was assigned to a specific salesperson or a specific sales support team member.

In the Sales Manager's experience this had a number of advantages. Namely, only by specifically allocating customers could the sales support people build a relationship between the two parties. And only through such a clear allocation was it possible to properly evaluate the performance and success of the sales support people.

Another change that had to be made was establishing congruent areas for external sales. Originally, two or three field sales areas were in one sales office area. In the re-organisation the regions were re-allocated so that office and field sales were working together.

The Sales Manager is a strong believer in team working: field and office sales basically organise the way they will deal with markets together and decide jointly on their objectives. This means, for example, that the smaller clients to be managed by the office sales support people will initially be suggested by the field salespeople. However, responsibility for sales from these telephone customers remains the joint responsibility of both office sales support and field sales personnel. This also meant that once a client had reached a certain size the field sales took over the management of that client and will visit that client when the sales office is contacted by that client.

In addition to the standard telephone servicing of customers by the sales support staff, the company ran a number of special campaigns every year. Their length depended on the campaign, but was usually at least two weeks. The objectives of the campaigns were, for example, to create visibility for a new product or highlight a special promotion. As a starting point the target clients were selected from the customer data base by both the sales support staff and the external sales force and the weeks when the campaigns would be run were based on the quarterly sales plan.

The introduction of bonuses for the sales support staff was closely linked with the setting of targets. Only team bonuses were paid, not individual bonuses. The company placed great emphasis on "simple daily projections of progress towards the monthly target". Every day the teams were shown the team results. Healthy competition, in the Sales Manager's opinion, was thus created. The information that was gathered contained the following elements:

How had customer sales grown in comparison with the same month in the previous year, both in total, and cumulatively? How individual product areas were developing? How could any variances be accounted for? What measures had been introduced?

In the Sales Managers' experience, the reorganisation did not pay off until year three. Almost half of the sales support staff were unable to meet the new demands and resigned of their own accord. The consequential integration of new staff took a lot of time and was expensive.

Thus, in the first year after reorganisation, office sales performance fell by 25%, it then stabilised at its previous level during the second year and rose in year three. Sales training refreshers were provided throughout the period.

In year three, telesales customers accounted for between 4 and 8% more sales than other customers. Telesales also accounted for 10 to 15% of total sales, with profit from telesales accounting for 15 to 20% of total profit. The company achieved much greater levels of contributions from clients managed by the office sales staff than from the average unmanaged customer.

The motivation of both office and field sales also increased. Offices sales could at last see their own success, and field sales could find time to deal with customers who were of strategic interest.

The end result of all these organisational changes was a self-managing, motivated office based sales force that now considers itself a key part of the company's sales effort and is routinely included in all the company's sales training events.