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Improving Sales Results by Reorganising The Sales Support Office
Have you compe across the old-style sales service department: the type with low paid, poorly qualified assistants to the salespeople who are not part of the sales training process and as a result process the sales somewhat haphazardly? The cost pressures in sales however are forcing organisations to increase the efficiency of their departments and to transfer active sales roles in to the sales office. This case study describes the experiences of one Sales Manager who reorganised his sales office so that he could improve sales results.
The Sales Manager's first job was to change the sales service staff from being simply “order processors” to being active sales staff. He did this through a series of sales training sessions. The areas covered in the sessions included tele-sales techniques, finding new customers and team working skills as well as efficient use of communications technology. Parallel to this sales training, the sales service team was restructured, clearly establishing its role as in pro-active sales. In practice this meant that every client was assigned to a specific sales person or a specific sales support team member. In the Sales Manager’s opinion this had a number of advantages. Namely, only by specifically allocating clients could the sales support team members build a relationship with the clients, and only through such a clear allocation was it possible to properly evaluate the performance of the sales support team.
Another step was the establishment of congruent areas for external sales. Originally, up to two or three field sales areas were in one sales support office area. During the re-organisation the regions were re-allocated so that sales office and field sales were working closely together.The Sales Manager is a big fan of team work: so field and office sales staff are encouraged to organise the way they will deal with markets together and decide objectives jointly. This means, for example, that the smaller customers are routinely managed by telephone by the office sales support team. However, responsibility for orders from these telephone clients remains the joint responsibility of both office sales support staff and field sales personnel. This also means that a field sales man will take over a customer when they have reached a certain pre-determined size and that these clients are also visited following a request to do so received by the office sales support team.
As well as the day-to-day telephone servicing of clients by the sales support staff, the company ran eight to ten special promotional events a year. Their length of each campaign depended on the promotion, but was usually at least two weeks. The aim of these campaigns was, for example, to introduce new products or to promote a special offer fast. To begin with, target clients were selected from the database by both sales support staff and external sales and the weeks for the promotion decided jointly in the context of a quarterly plan.
Bonuses were introduced for the sales support staff. These bonuses were closely linked with the setting of targets and only team bonuses were paid. The Sales Manager placed much emphasis on “simple daily projections of progress towards the monthly target”. The team results were displayed daily for the teams to see. In the Sales Manager’s opinion, this approach created healthy competition between the various sales support teams. The data that was gathered contained the following elements:
- - How had client sales progressed in comparison with the same month in the previous year, both in total, and cumulatively?
- - How were individual product areas developing?
- - How could any variances be accounted for?
- - What measures had been introduced?
- The Sales Manager reported that the reorganisation did not pay off until the third year. In addition, almost half of the original sales support staff were unable to meet the new demands and so resigned of their own accord. The subsequent integration of new staff took much managerial time and was expensive. Thus, in the first year after reorganisation the sales office performance actually fell by 25%. In the second year it then stabilised at its previous level and then rose in year three. Sales training refresher workshops were provided throughout this period.
In the third year, telesales clients accounted for between 4 and 8% more sales than other customers. Telesales also accounted for 10 to 15% of total sales, and profit from telesales accounted for 15 to 20% of total profit. This means that the department achieved significantly higher levels of contributions from the customer actively managed by the office sales staff than from the average customer. The motivation levels of both office staff and field sales staff also increased. Offices sales staff could at last see that they were successful, and field sales staff had more time to deal with customers who were of greater strategic interest. The end result of all these organisational changes was a self-managing, highly motivated office based sales force that now considers itself a central part of the company’s sales effort and so is routinely included in all the company’s sales training events.
