Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Figure 14.7 
Realigning sales 
structures and 
processes
Sales manager
control
activities
Salesperson
behavioural
performance
Salesperson
outcome
performance
Salesperson
characteristics
Sales
organisation
effectiveness

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THE STRATEGIC SALES ORGANISATION
(direct manager intervention in how salespeople do their jobs, and greater reliance on fixed-
salary compensation packages) (Piercy et al., 2004a, b).
The process of ‘reinventing’ the salesforce to meet the challenges of new markets and 
new strategies is likely to require attention to several critical issues:
● 
Focus on long-term customer relationships, but also assessing customer value and pri-
oritising the most attractive prospects.
● 
Creating sales organisation structures that are nimble and adaptable to the needs of dif-
ferent customer groups.
● 
Gaining greater ownership and commitment from salespeople by removing functional 
barriers within the organisation and leveraging team-based working.
● 
Shifting sales management from ‘command and control’ to coaching and facilitation.
● 
Applying new technologies appropriately.
● 
Designing salesperson evaluation to incorporate the full range of activities and outcomes 
relevant to new types of sales and account management jobs (Cravens, 1995).
For example, when the then-new CEO of Hewlett-Packard began that company’s 
remarkable performance improvement, he found that there were as many as 11 layers 
between him and a customer. Correspondingly, H-P was slower to respond to customers 
than its competitors, and of the 17,000 people working in corporate sales, only 10,000 
directly sold to customers – the rest were support staff or managers. His overhaul of 
H-P’s vast corporate salesforce involved: closing a large sales group that sold a broad 
portfolio of products and reallocating salespeople to product-specific groups, so they 
could master the products they sold; cutting hundreds of under-performing salespeople; 
removing three levels of sales management; and paring back internal meetings so sales-
people could spend more time with customers. H-P’s salesforce therefore spent more 
time in front of customers, responded faster to their needs and won more corporate sales 
deals (Tam, 2006).
Although beyond the scope of this present review, a study of the antecedents and conse-
quences of sales management control strategy reveals several issues, which are commonly 
neglected in leveraging change and superior performance in the salesforce as part of align-
ing sales efforts with strategic direction (Baldauf et al., 2005). It should be quite apparent, 
however, that new business and marketing strategies and an evolving role for the sales 
organisation in leading strategic customer management will inevitably require considerable 
re-evaluation of the management of the sales organisation.
While this agenda provides a framework for examining the operational characteristics 
of the strategic sales organisation, and evaluating organisational needs by defining the new 
domain for the strategic sales organisation, it is important to note that research also suggests 
the need to place developments into a broader context of shaping factors as well. This logic 
is summarised in Figure 14.8. The context for the strategic sales organisation includes factors 
such as:
●