Marketing concepts and applications

Sales Management: Strategies

Customers are motivated to buy a company's product when a company's sales staff is motivated by the correct managerial techniques. But what strategies can sales managers use to properly motivate and manage salespeople in the field? Bluntly, a sales consultant grouses when "left to their own devices, most salespeople will work less than 40 hours a week. This demands that sales management devote a significant amount of time to specifying, monitoring and controlling the daily activities of subordinates." (Gorelick, 2004) Three popular ways of doing such monitoring and motivating in the most effective ways possible are encouraging sales staff to target specific clients, rather than extend a wide reach of cold calls (also known as the time management stratgey), stressing solutions to specific customer problems and generating demand by highlighting specific customer problems, and by establishing sales employee incentives on long-term performance rather than short-term sales.

Saving Time by Segmenting the Market

Mark Hendricks in Entrepreneur magazine recently noted the increased popularity of 'time management' sales strategies in a less sales-friendly market. Using segmented and targeted research while deploying salespeople stragetically, hiring more of salepeople in general to target different market segments, "and investing more in training, supervision and technology to support sales," is now a popular managerial technique. This 'time management' strategy, or time compression, was born of an economic enviroronment boasting "savvier but less patient customers" and "the availability of more but sometimes less qualified candidates for sales jobs." (Hendricks, 2002, p.1) for instance, phamecutical companies like Pfizer now often have more drug representatives with fewer drugs under their care, and specific staff that highlight doctor's offices, while other salespeople market different products or different doses of drugs or sales packages to hospitals.

This stress on time management sales means targeted and focused objectives and directives. It means salespeole cannot waste prospects' time with "chitchat." Today's sucessful salespeople can not look for "easy, quick closes. They're not cold-calling. They're not selling solely on price. They're not just peddling products and services. and, above all, they're not waiting one minute for buyers to come to them." (Hendricks, 2002, p.1)

Problem-Solution

Consultant Dick Gorelick notes that when selling print advertising, for sales staff in this field acquiring orders is no longer the sole objective. "Orders represent the result of establishing unique perceived customer benefits. In other words, it's necessary to establish the unique conditions that lead to sales. The artifice involved in getting past a buying organization's gatekeeper may be part of a salesperson's bag of tricks, but that has little to do with establishing a decent buyer-seller relationship," over a long period of time, and understanding the customer's unique problems and needs. (Gorelick, 2004)

Rather, this problem-solution method of sales managing is heavy on marketing, customer insight and systematic selling, and light on stressing the need for sales people to take and make lots of small, immediate orders. "It's not as easy to get orders," says one Atlanta sales consultant, but you must create long-term demand instead of just fulfillng immeidate demands, by deliving into customer's long-term, likely problems and needs. "Customers are looking for solutions to problems, and those solutions have to relate to cutting costs or increasing profits. To get insight into solutions, salespeople have to study customers thoroughly before they even meet them. "People want to hear, 'Here are your needs, here's the solution.'" (Hendricks, 2002, p.1)

However, to save the customer time, managers and staff must put in extra time to discover what the customer might consider a problem. Sales staff must scan company Web sites, read corporate annual reports, and talk to competitors in the industry so they can get a feel for prospects' issues. Sales people should thus be rewarded not based on immediate returns and quick-profit producing sales but long-term client building results. Developing and executing such a problem-based sales approach can take longer htan traditional approaches that simply stress product quality. "Eighteen months ago, an opportunity that did not pan out after four to six weeks would have been labeled a low priority," but a "sales cycle of three to four months is now mainstream." It may take twice as many contacts to close a sale today and "surprisingly, both entrepreneurs and experts agree sellers can't always shortcut the process by just dropping the price. "The old method of selling by price is falling by the wayside...Organizations are willing to pay more if the product's value is evident. They won't pay a dollar for anything if they don't see the value," and the need for targeting long-term sales problems.(Hendricks, 2002, p.1)

Motivating the Staff on a Long-Term Basis