Introduction 

The purpose of this assignment is to demonstrate my skills in recruiting a team of salespeople and designing an overall sales programme to help the company achieve sales targets for the year. After leaving college, I managed to grab a good job opportunity in an IT company. The company sells IT equipment to other business companies and B2B companies. My job position here is of a sales manager so I will be responsible for different sets of activities, some of which are being demonstrated in this paper in sections that follow.

Drafting a Job Description for a Salesperson

Here I am tasked with drafting a job description for a new sales person. While doing so, I need to be careful of covering some essential elements of a job description that as expected responsibilities from the recruit, personality characteristics, and qualifications (Bolander et al. 2020).

Expected 

Following is an outline of things expected of a sales person:

Personality Characteristics 

The salesperson should have the following personality characteristics (Herjanto and Franklin 2019):

The 70-20-10 model is going to be utilised for preparing the sales training programme for the sales team. This model emphasises the significance of social and experiential learning, besides traditional training, for the sales person (Najafi et al. 2022). The highlights of this model are that 70% of the learning should come from on-the-job experiences and challenges. The next 20% of the learning should come from interactions among sales people and with clients, and feedback from sales managers, and customers. The last 10% of the learning should come from structured courses and programmes. In this way, this model encourages the development of a blended learning environment for sales people, providing them ample opportunities to learn from many sources and under different situations. Moreover, they also get to learn about the applicability of all learning to their actual sales task.

On-the-Job Experiences and Challenges

This starts with providing training on the values, culture, team, and worldview of the company. This follows providing A broader industry outlook, which is also regarded as referral marketing. The next would be providing an understanding of the position and market of the company, like who their customers are and their unique value proposition. Then, an introduction to the IT equipment will be given to help understand its usage and applications, which will help during interaction with decline.

After the product introduction, sales concepts will be discussed to show how sales work, sales protocol followed in the company, and sales closure. In addition, salespeople will be provided opportunities for sales calls and demos through call scripts, call flow and hands-on practising to improve the customer interaction capabilities of the sales people.

In addition to sales concepts, salespeople will be offered extensive knowledge of the sales process that includes day-to-day management of sales activities comma pipeline reviews comma, pipeline reviews, effective utilisation of the CRM, etc.

Moreover, feedback sessions will be organised to provide feedback on the training, and to discuss things that worked well and the others that did not.

Interactions and Feedback from Others

Effective sales training does not feature expensive and complicated activities. Instead, it can be offered in easy steps as discussed above and by organising feedback sessions with salespeople. Moreover, the most senior sales people are encouraged to share their knowledge and skills with the ones having relatively little experience. For example, experienced sales people can be asked to train the less experienced salespeople on call strategies, closing deals, and handling client objections successfully (Vasanthi and Basariya 2019).

Feedback can be incorporated into training programmes in multiple ways, such as peers, managers, customers, and self-assessment. Each of these sources can be useful for transferring valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the sales people, the sales process adopted by them, and the way they interact with customers. Various methods can be deployed to collect feedback other than peers, managers and self-assessment. These methods include collecting feedback by serving customers, interviewing managers, and role-playing diverse and potential customer scenarios (Nikolić, Perić and Bovan 2020). This feedback session will be a regular practice to help salespeople learn their respective areas for improvement and provide means to go about it.

Building Relationships with Customers 

In this section, the importance of building relationships with customers and ways to go about this will be discussed. This is in line with “Customer Relationship Management (CRM)”, which emphasises managing interactions and thus, relationships with customers to enhance sales effectiveness, business performance, and customer satisfaction (Rodriguez and Boyer 2020).  

Importance 

Selling IT equipment is different from selling any other product or service as the IT salesperson does not just sell a product, but also a solution to a problem. For example, selling higher capacity RAM to address slow processing at client computers. While this sounds good to learn the fact, it would not be easy for salespeople to convince the customers. Until there is an excellent understanding of customers’ needs as learned from careful interactions with them, it will be difficult to know their needs and wants. Once the needs and wants of the client are known, the salesperson would be able to provide the best solutions to problems the client is facing. Managing to keep a healthy discussion with the client and providing proper solutions are critical to generating the best possible value. Providing good solutions to clients should not be the ultimate goal for the salespeople. Rather, the focus should be on constructing long-term associations with the clients to represent the sales person as trusted advisors for them (Juanamasta et al. 2019). Ensuring to satisfy all these can lead to repeat business, referrals, and others that further boost sales performance both for the individual and the company.  

Different Ways

Building long-term relationships with customers is a difficult task that requires consistent use of effective communication, follow up and feedback. The sales person who pitched and sold the product to the client needs to be in touch with the client throughout the entire sales cycle. During this association, the sales person is expected to offer regular updates and guidance to the client. In addition to providing guidelines and support, the sales person should proactively seek feedback from the client and act on the outcomes to show improvement. It is important to show that the sales person is concerned about the needs and wants of the client and is always there to help on the same. These are all things that need to be done to build up productive relationships with customers and earn customer loyalty. Some essential things for developing long-term relationships with clients are discussed below (Itani et al. 2020):

Understand Client Needs:

The very first thing to develop long-term relationships with customers is to understand their needs perfectly. For that matter, you may be required to do extensive research on client interaction skills, probe as many questions as required to understand their needs, listen actively, and always have this passion to empathize with their respective pain points.

Fulfil Promises Made to Client:

The second most crucial aspect of building a long-term relationship with the client is to ensure to deliver on the promises made to the client and even exceed their expectations with the same. To fulfil the commitments, it is important to meet the deadlines and provide quality results to keep the satisfaction level of the client up. Also, it is important to be proactive, transparent, and responsive while communicating with the client to behave professionally, listen to their pain points and offer solutions relevant to their respective concerns. These are all things that demonstrate that the sales person takes concerns with the needs of the client.

Take Regular Follow-Up:

The third thing is to take regular follow-up with the client after making the sale. A regular check up with the kind is required to understand and gather information on the client experience with the product and measure client satisfaction rate. Nurturing a positive relationship with clients does not mean selling relevant products but also providing ongoing service and support, and educating customers on how they can better utilise the product. Clients should be asked to offer additional value in the forms of referrals and testimonials, and case studies. This demonstrates that the sales person is not just concerned about making a sale but also concerned with the pain points and needs of the client and providing the maximum value possible.

Foster a Productive Relationship:

The sales person should also learn to keep the relationship fresh and engaging with the client to nurture a long-term relationship. For that matter, it is imperative to stay in touch with the client with different offers and schemes and provide useful tips on how to use the product they currently use. Additionally, the sales person should be there to celebrate the birthdays and milestones of the client to show an engagement. All these are critical things to do to ensure the sales person is seriously committed to serving the client on plenty of things under the job scope of the sales person.

Seek Testimonials and Referrals:

The sales person must develop a habit of seeking referrals and testimonials from satisfied clients to showcase these as achievements to other clients and thus, attract more new clients. In return for this favour, the client should be given some incentives in the form of discounts and rewards. The sales person should regularly be on the hunt for extracting values from existing clients in possible ways to grow their respective network as well as a reputation as a sales person.

Adapt to Feedback:

Lastly, it is critical for the sales person to understand and adapt to the evolving needs and preferences of clients to foster long-term relationships with them. To do so, it is advisable to keep monitoring the situation and behaviour of your respective client to anticipate their evolving needs. The next thing would be to utilise such findings to modify the solution and presentation of offers and schemes to sell more products and build a long-lasting relationship.

Sales Force and Compensation Plan

This section highlights my attempt to organise the sales force and an explanation of the compensation plan for the sales team. Nevertheless, salespeople should know the benefits ofworking in this role and why they should manage to survive under tremendously challenging work circumstances.

Outline for Organising Sales Force

There are different ways to organise the Salesforce; however, I have planned to organise by focusing on the different products sold here. So, here is a brief description of how things are going to take shape:

Product-Oriented Sales Force:

In this type of sales force, salespeople are selected to sell a particular product, where they are not required to deal with the extensive product portfolio of the company. The good thing about this strategy is sales people get enormous opportunities and time to gain expertise in that product category. This strategy is really suitable for a company that deals with selling a range of complex products. The advantage of the sales people becoming an expert in a particular product is they can also be involved in product development. They can share valuable inputs based on their experience dealing with the product. On the other hand, this kind of sales force can be beneficial for increased product sales. However, some factors must be taken into consideration with this kind of sales force (Wiradendi Wolor 2019). One such consideration is the costs as the sales people will be required to travel more as is the nature of this sales force. However, this sales force has a noticeable downside as the sales person will be an expert in a particular product and cannot guide customers to other products if they are interested. In that way, customers would need to work more to reach other salespeople, which eventually will affect the speed and efficiency of these sales operations (Wiradendi Wolor 2019).

Compensation Plan 

As with other companies, different elements will be made into the compensation plan. This compensation plan has been designed as per “Herzberg’s Theory of Motivation” which identifies some factors as dissatisfiers and others as satisfiers. One of the dissatisfiers is compensation and benefits (Peramatzis and Galanakis 2022). This is briefly demonstrated below:

Salary + Commission:

This is one of the most commonly adopted pay-to-salespeople. As the name indicates, it blends a base salary with additional earnings from the commission. This gives salespeople a reliable source of earnings in addition to earning more based on the volume of sales they make. The salary-to-commission ratio would be 65/35. However, it will vary depending on the product and case complexity.

Fixed Percentage-Based Commission:

In this pay type, the sales people are paid a certain percentage of one sale they make. The commission percentage is 7.5%. So, if the sales person sells products worth $2,000, they are supposed to earn $150.

Bonus Plan:

We also offer a bonus plan to eligible sales people. This is given to salespeople on meeting and overshooting some definite targets and completing particular tasks. However, the bonus amount is fixed and offered to salespeople on hitting a sales milestone and others. This is kind of incentivizing salespeople who are hard workers and have proved their worth in the company with repetitive excellent performance.

Set Rate Commission:

There is a fixed rate assigned to selling a product. A salesperson upon selling a product will be eligible for a set rate commission.

Motivation, and Leadership Structure and Style 

Motivating Salespeople 

We understand the importance of keeping salespeople motivated to continually achieve new sales milestones (Good, Hughes and LaBrecque 2021). So, below are some ways we attempt to keep our salespeople motivated:

We try to give our sales people a clear direction and purpose by setting up specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for them.

Training is offered to sales people on a regular basis or basis of training needs assessment to support their needs of enhancing skills, broadening product knowledge, and enhancing sales techniques.

Competitive compensation and benefits are offered to salespeople to ensure fairness and transparency in to ensure fairness and transparency in the policy compensation policy. This includes base salary, bonuses, commissions, and incentives.

Top performances are recognised to reward in suitable ways for achieving new milestones, such as incentives, public recognition, etc.

A positive and supportive work culture that supports teamwork, open communication forma and collaboration is promoted.

Salespeople are provided with the necessary tools and resources to help them do their jobs easily. This includes CRM systems, sales support, etc.

Salespeople are provided with career growth opportunities and promotions to show how the organisation values their contribution.

Feedback stations are regularly organised to share constructive feedback with them and also receive feedback on how we can improve for them.

Leadership Structure 

The leadership structure that is typically followed in this company follows a traditional hierarchical model. It demonstrates clear roles and responsibilities for each leader at each level. As part of this leadership structure, effective communication and collaboration between each leader is valued. In addition, the leadership structure is aligned in such a way that salespeople can easily reach the respective leader when they need to and effectively achieve their respective sales targets using such resources. All of these contribute to excellent customer service and satisfaction and facilitate momentous business success (Johnston and Marshall 2020). The leadership structure in this company consists of the following:

Sales Manager

Team Leader

Sales Director

Regional Manager

Sales Executive

Vice President of Sales

Chief Sales Officer

Chief Revenue Officer

Leadership Style (Charismatic Leadership)

Great sales leaders can demonstrate distinguished leadership traits, such as transformational leadership, autocratic leadership, transactional leadership, servant leadership, democratic leadership, charismatic leadership, etc. However, leaders in this company are often charismatic (Machokoto 2019). They are more concerned about driving sales through their experience in handling customers, communication skills, and unique ability to charm the audience. Like this company, charismatic sales leaders can be seen across different other companies because they possess some exceptional sales skills and leadership qualities. They are confident, charming, empathetic, motivated, energetic, and strong communicators.

The essential leadership qualities and skills of charismatic sales leaders are inspirational for salespeople to effectively deal with customers, convert potential leads into sales, maintain long-lasting relationships with customers, and thus, contribute to the success and profitability of the business. Charismatic leaders have grown learning how to convert potential leads into sales. They impart the same in salespeople over a definite period. Charismatic leaders prefer a goal-oriented approach and like their teams to follow and achieve SMART goals set for each (Machokoto 2019).  

Team Performance Evaluation

The team’s performance will be evaluated by considering the following steps:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Performance will be evaluated against set KPIs for each. These are revenue, profit margin, average transaction size, customer lifetime value, conversion rate, and customer acquisition cost.

Data Collection and Analysis.

Performance data is documented for each month, covering different KPIs and the performance of each individual. In addition to this, periodic employee feedback surveys are rolled out to gather the opinions of salespeople on the chosen topic and use the insights to devise actions. A team meeting is conducted after each month to review the performance and provide constructive feedback.

Regular Performance Reviews.

Performance reviews are done bi-annually to discuss sales, customer interactions, and others, and provide constructive feedback to salespeople. It is done with the help of performance appraisals of salespeople. It is a meeting between a sales manager and sales person. The sales person is eligible for a pay hike, but the percentage of the hike is dependent on the performance of each sales person and how the interview with the sales manager turns out for the sales person.

Coaching and Employee Training.

Salespeople are provided regular training to help adapt to emerging business needs and changing market trends. In addition, the chosen sales person is offered coaching by the sales manager. The purpose of coaching is to address performance challenges in real time and help sales person perform better (Høgevold et al. 2022).

Needful Adjustments.

After the sales performance evaluation, the sales program is adjusted a bit to accommodate additional actions to address performance flaws identified in a performance review.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, the design of the sales program for the case IT company is crucial for driving salespeople to perform and achieve sales targets. A comprehensive job description as

discussed will align fresh recruits with organisational goals and objectives. The approach to designing a sales training program using the 70-20-10 model promotes peer learning that enhances learning and development prospects for the team. Herzberg’s inspired compensation plan will attract salespeople and promote an engaging work culture. The charismatic leadership style under a hierarchical model is suitable for driving teams to emerging sales goals. Regular performance evaluations, training and others ensure any deviations are properly addressed and continuous improvement is pursued.

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