Sales & Marketing Management

The advantages of this approach are:

It can stimulate a lot of positive discussion that produces new and

innovative approaches to familiar problems.

It can be a real motivator for a salesperson to strive to make the best

presentation, particularly when they know senior management is present.

It further provides a good forum for management to interact more with field

salespeople and be more in touch with the real problems encountered in the

field.

Another method that can be extremely effective is to spend time at sales
meetings doing some role-plays.

These role-plays could be common or uncommon situations encountered by

the salespeople. The salespeople should discuss the role-plays as to

handling the situation or other ways of handling the situation.

Scenario #6:

Burdening salespeople with excessive paperwork

Problem

When times are tough, businesses will often cut down the overhead by reducing
office staff. This sometimes results in shoving extra reporting and paperwork
down the pipe on to the salespeople's shoulders.

In this case, not enough thought has been given to the results of this action.
Without sales, the business will not survive and, in tough times, maintaining,
and increasing sales is even more vital.

If the sales force has to take on office tasks such as:

Doing credit checks

Pricing and extending invoices

Some other duty formerly performed by office staff

They will be much less effective in the field selling the product. Often the
salespeople are not qualified or experienced to do this clerical work. They may
not have the computer skills to complete the work in a timely fashion. The
result is that the business is paying an extremely high price in relation to the
savings realized when salespeople are left to do these kinds of tasks.