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How Sales Office Reorganisation Can Improve Sales Results

A Sales Manager inherited an old-style sales service department with low paid, poorly qualified assistants who had not received any sales training and considered themselves as order processors. As a result the sales office processed the sales orders somewhat haphazardly. Challenged with the objective of increasing sales in the face of cost pressures the Sales Manager had to reorganise the department to make it more efficient. This case study describes how he did it.

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 areas covered in the training included tele-sales techniques, customer acquisition and teamwork as well as use of communications technology. Parallel to this sales training, the service department was restructured, clearly establishing its role as in sales. 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.

A further step was the establishment of 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 means that field sales will take over a customer when they have reached a worthwhile size and that they are visited when office sales support receive such a request.

As well as the "usual" telephone servicing of customers by the sales support team, the company ran eight to ten special campaigns a year. Their length depended on the campaign, but was usually at least two weeks. The aim of the campaigns was, for example, to introduce a new product or to promote a special offer quickly. To begin with, target customers were selected jointly from the customer data by both sales support staff and external sales and the campaign weeks were decided in the context of a quarterly plan.

The introduction of bonuses for the sales support staff was closely linked with the setting of targets. No individaul bonuses were paid, only team bonuses. The company placed great emphasis on "simple daily projections of progress towards the monthly target". The team results were shown daily to the teams. In the Sales Manager's opinion, this created healthy competition between teams. 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. Nearly 50% of the original sales support staff were unable to raise to the challenge and left the comapny 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 workshops were delivered 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 finally see the results of their efforts and the field sales team found more time to manage the relationships with their strategic customers.

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.

About the Author

Richard Stone is a Director for Spearhead Training Limited that specialises in running
management training
courses to improve business performance. Richard provides consultancy advice for numerous world leading companies. View more details by clicking on the link.

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