Sales force compensation

Sales force compensation

Introduction

However, an engaged and experienced sales person is important for the organization, but it is also obvious that an experienced sales person alone cannot guarantee that he can achieve the challenging selling objective of the organization (The Forum Corporation, 2008). There are six components of or dimensions in later discussion that overview about the six dimensions of success of sales force.

Discussion

Sales organizations are facing strong challenges now a day. It is the fact that board of directors and CEO are anticipating greater performance comparatively and on the other hand customers are minimizing their risk very carefully and opt for greater values. However, an engaged and experienced sales person is important for the organization, but it is also obvious that an experienced sales person alone cannot guarantee that he can achieve the challenging selling objective of the organization (The Forum Corporation, 2008).

In today's world, organizations consider of following six essentials areas for success of sales team, these essentials are as follows:

Strategy and structure

Customer knowledge

Talent

Climate

Processes

Support systems

Above mentioned six dimensions are interdependent in nature as strategy of the business is followed and give information to the sales of organization toward targeting the customers and in the same way other dimensions are interconnected with each other in a systematic way. Therefore a business professional need to frequently refresh and integrate these six dimensions to give a constant and effective performance which is further explained as follows:

Strategy and structure

For sales team to achieve successful and consistent outcomes, they require sales strategy that is clearly communicated based on company strategy or business unit strategy. This strategy is also important due to expected changing market conditions, whether chasing new opportunity or facing threats. Strategy is assumed as rudder of the ship that maintains the direction of the ship in all weather conditions. Any strategy of business or division should define three major areas, which are: the market, in which business competes such as geography and target customer, the main objective or goal of the business such as market share, growth or profit and the competitive advantage of the business (Agarwal et al., 2009). Therefore with clearly stated and delivered strategy of the business or division, sales team leader can develop a sales strategy which is also known as go-to-market strategy and it concentrates on the following main areas:

Strategy helps in identifying the segmentation of customers based on similar set of characteristics.

It also helps sales team to focus on providing value proposition to each identified segments of customer.

It also helps to create channel regarding to sales team by associating type of sales resources such as key account reps, general reps, independent resellers, inside salespeople, and distributor etc. on basis of customer segment and territory.

Strategy also helps in identifying the size of sales force and structure on the basis of territory and also determines the structure of sales team. It is done by determining the number of customers a salesperson is responsible for and structure is identified by assigning the number ...