Page 67 - DMGT507_SALES AND PROMOTIONS MANAGEMENT

Unit 3: Motivating and Compensating the Sales Force

Notes
In a sales environment, the rapid expansion of the basic catalog of products and services,
the changing technical environment, and the need to sell in new ways to new customers
place such a burden on the sales force that their existing knowledge simply may be
inadequate to the task. Psychologists tell us that in response to this condition – known as
cognitive overload – people often retreat back into modes of performance that make them
more comfortable. And that can be deadly to an organization that needs its sales force to
meet new challenges by performing in new ways.
More sophisticated tools can help here. For example, the Accenture Sales Workbench is a
comprehensive, technology-based tool that delivers a salesforce-centric, role-based
supportive environment that provides the knowledge, content, legacy applications,
productivity tools, learning, collaboration and expert network capabilities that enable
salespeople to take their performance to higher levels. The supportive environment created
by the tool can also be tied to an enterprise wide performance management capability that
links differentiated individual performance to higher workforce performance and,
ultimately, to high performance for the organization as a whole.
A similar kind of sales workbench has been used effectively by a major US medical
products distributor to increase the types and numbers of products it sells to physicians.
Although the company offered more than 30,000 medical products, it found that most of
its customers were consistently ordering from just a small percentage of the total catalog.

To help its sales force succeed, the company rolled out an application on a Tablet PC that
is now used by its field sales force. One of the functions of the new application is what the
company calls a "condition calculator." It uses data mining techniques – similar to the
methods used by Amazon.com to link one customer's purchase patterns to those of other
customers – to suggest additional products the physician may need based on what other
doctors have purchased, on that doctor's own past buying preferences, and on known
ways that multiple products can help serve patients better. As a result of using this new
tool, the company has seen dramatic improvement in its sales performance, including a
400 percent increase in cross-selling.
These sales tools, along with improved training, put workers in a position where they
have a better chance of overcoming cognitive overload-and, more important, a better
chance of fulfilling their potential.
Going Back to Go Forward
In the face of complex performance environments and looming worker scarcity, sales
executives must return to the basics of human motivation to understand why financial
incentives alone cannot hope to move the behaviors of the sales organization in a direction
that can support business growth. When compensation is approximately equal among the
sales forces of competing companies, those with a better chance of achieving high
performance will be the ones that recognize the importance of such things as peer
recognition and a trusting relationship between salespeople and management.
Companies must also be better attuned to the challenges of the complex marketplace and
of cognitive overload; the two often combine to impede the ability of the sales force to
achieve its potential. It is vital to both personal and corporate success that critical workforces
are given the tools they need to succeed in a more complicated marketplace. Technology
is a key enabler here. Advanced solutions now provide real-time performance support for
sales personnel at the time of need, and also provide links to companywide performance
management systems.

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