This paper provides an analysis of the different challenges and remedies affecting the sales and sales personnel within the organization. These challenges range from low sales volumes and bad territorial strategy to ineffective management, hence resulting to poor motivation among employees.
1. What are some of the problems that DSI’s salespeople have experienced as a result of not having had the direction of a sales manager for the first 12 months?
One of the challenges that DSI’s sales people face is lack of leadership in their profession; as a result, they cannot effectively express their efforts and concerns. The company has been in operation for 12 months; from the sales point of view, DSI’s salespeople lack direction and mission of the company’s goals. Cindy’s response clearly demonstrates that: she has had no one to report to or borrow sales advice from.
Second, there is lack of information on the company products as well as the target market. This is evident from Cindy’s response that she visits all doctors disregarding their professional/operation specialties. Since DSI’s salespeople poorly understand the products’ usage and target market, they spend most of their time visiting the wrong market and their efforts bring zero results.
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Third, DSI’s salespeople lack motivation in their work. This observation is clear as they call about five people per day, which is lower than the standard rate of ten clients per day within the sales profession. This affects the sales volumes as well as the general awareness of the company’s products. The company should train its executives to equip them with the basics required for performing standard sales within the pharmaceutical industry. This should bring them to the industry standards level, thus boosting their confidence and performance.
The fourth challenge is lack of strategic territorial design for the company’s employees. DSI’s salespersons have vast and undistinguished sales regions that pose challenges to the company’s effective coverage of these areas. Also, having salespeople meeting and calling the same clients affects clients’ attitude towards the company. This also affects customers’ willingness to buy from the company.
2. What process should be used to design new territories for the 6 sales reps?
The chapter expounds on the basic control unit as an appropriate tool to use in the management of vast territorial markets. Here the control unit has information on the required aspects of the market as well as the targets for each salesperson. The use of zip codes within each territory (city) and streets helps the company know their potential clients sites as well as have information on the population statistics of the clinical and health facilities. These data help analyze the clients’ potential both in capacity and financial ability to acquire the company’s products. Another requirement in designing the territorial management is the effort needed to competitively access each unit and client with a strong control structure. This will help in the next stage of defining the sales territories. Defining the sales boundaries helps in assigning each sales executive their area of operation. This approach helps avoid clouding of information in a singular unit; as a result, situations like Cindy and Mike selling to the same client will not happen again. In designing the sales territories, DSI should take into consideration the amount of workload to ensure equity in distribution to the various salespeople involved. This will help in total and overall optimum production from their salespersons. Modifying the structure of reporting to show information that is relevant and beneficial would also boost sales volumes.
3. Assume you are Lydell. What types of information would you use to conduct a sales analysis of your reps’ territories??
The information Lydell should use in analyzing his salespersons and territories include the daily and weekly sales reports, the call reports and the clientele prospect reports. Lydell should also consider the sales executives’ expense accounts as well as financial records. These are reports from the territories with regard to the viability of each unit. These data help analyze which product suits which region and clientele preferences. In addition, the information from the sales executives helps in strategizing the marketing tools used to increase awareness and sales volumes. The information needed is shown within the chapter Exhibit 9.7 that forms the basic standard of analysis of the sales projections of the company (Johnston et al., 2003).
Establishing good territorial design and defining clear targets for the sales executives would help produce reports that Lydell will be able to use in designing efficient DSI policies that would improve the sales volumes. Having more sales personnel would also help cover the intended territory and get the information needed to increase the sales volumes and product awareness in the market (Sales et al., 2006). This means that Lydell would need to hire additional executives to have a chain of command within the territories for easy and effective control.
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