Designing Sales Force Strategy and Structure

Marketing managers face many sales force strategy and design questions. How should salespeople and their jobs be structured? Territorial sales force structure is a sales force organization that assigns each salesperson to anlimited geographic area and sells the company's full line services and products to all customers in that territory.  Advantages include following:

1.   It describes the salesperson's job.
2.   The person acquires credit for what they accomplish
3.   person works in a territory
4.   Increases the sales persons want to build local business.
5.   Travelling expenses are low (because of reduced territorial size).

This form is frequently supported at various levels by managerial structure. Product sales force structure is a sales force group under which salespeople specialize in selling just a portion of the company's products or lines.            Problems may occur if a single customer buys various different products from the company. Extra expenses of this method must be compared with the more specialized manufacture knowledge and additional attention to specific products. Customer sales force structure is a sales force association under which sales people specialize in selling just to certain industries or customers.  This form may help to become more customer targeted. This form carefully considers prime customers.  Usually complex sales-force structure forms are deviations of the basic three above mentioned where combinations occur. Each of the company should choose a sales force structure that best serves the requirement of its customers and fits its total marketing strategy. Salespeople constitute one of the most costly and most productive assets of the company. Mostly companies utilize some form of workload approach to find out sales force size. The workload schema is an approach of setting sales force size, where the company groups count into different classes (or status) and sizes and then determines how much salespeople are required to call. The company can have an outside sales force (field sales-force) that travels to call on customers or they may have an inside sales force which business conducted from their offices using telephone or visits t the prospective purchaser. Various companies have increased the size of their inside sales forces and have added to reduce time demands on their outside sales forces:

1.   Technical support people.
2.   Sales assistants.
3.   Telemarketers (by directly using the telephone to sell to consumers).

The days while a single salesperson handled large and significant customers are  vanishing. Nowadays, team selling, by using teams of people from marketing, sales, engineering, technical support, finance and even upper management to service big, complicated accounts, is being used. A structure must be established that considers rewards and compensation if this technique is to be effective.

In team selling situations, Pitfalls include following:

1.   Selling teams may confuse or overwhelm customers.
2.   Salespeople may have difficulty in learning to work with and trust others on a   team.
3.   There may be complications in evaluating specific contributions to the team selling effort.