Robert Grubbs
Case Analysis 3.2
April 3, 2013
Hanover-Bates Chemical Corporation
1. Current Situation James Sprague is the newly appointed district sales manager for the northeast. Upon arriving he had dinner with Hank Carver and John Follet, two senior sales representatives, and discussed his plans to review the company’s data prepared by the national sales manager and better the area’s profits. Carver, the most experience sales representative, took offense to analysis saying that his 34 years of experience obviously does not count for anything, and threatened to leave and go to a competitor. His district has a large number of potential accounts that are not being utilized. The sales by account and gross profit of the northeast
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The analysis will be better with the combined knowledge of the northeast region and the sales numbers given by the national sales manager.
6. Rational Working with Carver will allow both sides to accomplish their goals, because Carver will know his 34 years of experience is important to the company. Sprague will be able to learn valuable information from Carver as well, because he lacks the field experience that the senior sales representative has. The analysis of numbers is a very useful tool in the business world, but experience is something that cannot be thought or simulated. To be a successful branch manager, he is going to need his knowledge of the data combined with the problems and issues that the sales people will come into contact with out in the field. Carver would more than likely gladly help and follow the new direction of the branch, as long as he feels like his many years of experience is being taken into the final decision. Sprague must be able to balance the power, and not allow the older sales people to start making decisions for him, but he has to allow them to voice their opinion about the changes. He needs to be able to explain the reasoning behind his changes to the sales representatives. Then he can make the changes in the sales efforts and the sales team will see why he is doing that, and they will know that they had an input on
A salesperson’s career depends largely on the respect that others have for him. Without respect, Willie cannot sell himself to his family, friends, or clients. Willie understands this, and takes pride in the positive reputation he thinks he has with buyers across the country. In this way, Biff is a client of Willie’s, who purchases the wisdom that his father has to offer.
While it is true that Ms. Forthright had always exceeded her budgeted sales, the extent to which she diverts away from the managers projections does not necessarily means that she is violating honesty and integrity. Her decision on what her budgeted sales for the year is highly relevant to the data available to her. Her projections tends to lie between the field manager and the marketing manager’s predictions, which can be reasonable because in the past years, the field manager’s projections tend to be over what the actual sales of the year will be.
The biggest challenge that they face as a company is they do not have the room the increase expenditure by such a vast amount. Currently there is $3,675,000 in promotional dollars allocated as follows; sales and administration expense (995,000), cooperative advertising programs with retailers (1,650,000), consumer advertising (562,000) and trade promotion (467,000). adding the $225,000 increase in consumer advertising will not allow the 5% of expected sales for total promo expenditures. John Bott, the vice president of sales disagreed with the budget allocation and noted that sales expenses and administration cost were projected to be $65,000 in 2008. This led him to believe that an additional sales representative would be needed to service company accounts because 50 were being added. Therefore he estimated this addition would cost at least $70,000 including salary and expenses in 2008. Bott also stated that “That's about $135,000 in additional sales expense that have to be added to our promotional budget for 2008”
It seems clear from the preceding discussion that, although definitely a factor, personality and physical appearance and abilities alone did not adequately account for Mr. Spencer’s success in his role as a salesperson. It seems his dedication and apparent drive to excel, as witnessed by his willingness to sacrifice family relationships, was perhaps a greater factor. There is also some evidence of a motivational and training element within the Tri-American Corporation, as evidenced by the annual company sales conferences, feeding into the findings by Churchill et al. (1985) that influenceable factors had a greater effect on salesperson performance. Finally, one cannot discount the presence of sheer luck in contributing to Mr. Spencer’s success, especially early on in his first year.
3. The VP of Sales has suggested foregoing the DFW market and adding a sales representative for $60,000 dollars to focus on increasing retail accounts and professional customers.
Because Harrington Collection thinks that sales people are the most important factor in the consumer decision-making process, they spend significant resources training their personnel and offering them attractive commissions. Their expenses are understandable, and didn’t change for the fiscal year of 2007. What did change were the Manufacturing Group’s expenses. The Manufacturing Group’s SG&A increased 4.63% in 2007, meaning that the cost of maintaining the current manufacturing set up is increasing.
These transformative changes to the selling environment are ultimately forcing the salesperson to reengineer and rethink how they approach their business accounts. Failure in adapting to these changes can result in many adverse situations but ultimately revolves around ineffective team selling.
I don’t think that I need to have an extensive sales force in order to be successful. I think the biggest decision that I made in 2015 Q2 was increasing the large customer discounts for segments B and D from 12% discount up to 14% discount. I noticed that last quarter both of these segments expressed their concern that they were not getting the additional discounts that they should for being such long time customers.
Low sales numbers, fraudulent sales data, and improved employee communication methods were several big issues plaguing the organization and the HR Department. PAC 's reliance on one customer for the majority of sales leads to low sales as the company cut back on purchases. In light of these sales, PAC should work to increase marketing activities in its present markets while working towards expanding to new potential ones. This course of action benefits PAC as it collectively helps generate more contracts and a stronger customer base for sales.
Maureen Frye is an assistant product manager within Quaker’s Titanium Alloys division. Based on her analysis of this division’s sales data she concluded that revenues could be increased if sales staff allocated more time to winning larger accounts (and less to smaller accounts). Having received management
of the key issues result from John’s inability to comprehend the difference between sales representative and a sales manager. He was overly enthusiastic about his position and disregarded Phil Jackson’s tips on how to be successful as a sales manager. Sales managers must be multi-taskers who plan, organize and lead the functions of all customer contact and ensures that these methods of contact maximize the profit and sales goals of the company which hires them. A salesperson is responsible only for his/her own territory – a sales manager is responsible for the entire sales force and their productivity and revenue that
Hanover-Bates Chemical Corporation produces chemicals for the chemical plating industry. It has plants in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Newark. The production process involves taking chemicals purchased from other suppliers and mixing them into user-based formulas. The Hanover-Bates has a strong balance sheet and trades on the over-the-counter market. There are seven sales districts within the organization with a total of forty sales representatives. Each receives a salary, fringe benefits, and commissions of 0.5 percent of their dollar sales volume up to their sales quota. Field sales efforts are extremely important and quality control is critical with supplying the plater with the
Frank, manager of corporate reporting at Amalgamated Forest Products, has threatened to go public with information regarding a falsified report on the effect of effluent controls on the discharge of wastewater from pulp and paper companies, which has angered his boss, Jim McIntosh and the company’s president, Jim Letourneau. Letourneau was to testify before a legislative subcommittee the following week and use the report, “Endangered Species: The Pulp and Paper Industry in the Upper Peninsula”, to give the industry’s perspective on proposed legislation. The section of the report which contained the falsified financial information was prepared by Tina
The newly appointed district sales manager, Larry Barr, faces the problem of allocating sales quotas among his various sales representatives. This decision will affect everyone's earnings including his own. This problem is compounded by the fact that different territories have, for a variety of reasons, different potentials. In addition, the territory that is known to be the toughest will soon require a new sales rep.
Jacobson first consulted Dan Gunther who was in charge of the Boston Division. Jacobson consulted Gunther due to his fifteen-year experience with the company. He figured he would have the best insight to the sales were stagnant because of his wisdom and experience. Jacobson found out that the flat sales of the Boston branch was due to the irrational/unreasonable demands of their client. Then he contacted the Philadelphia branch. Carol Klein, the key account manager, told Jacobson that the reason of her flat sales was due to personal reasons that were going on in her life. She was having issues juggling her stressful job and taking care of her family as well. Although this is a valid excuse of something that many people struggle with, it should not be negatively affected her work performance. The next sales representative that Jacobson consulted was Mike Wagner in Washington DC. Wagner claimed that he is having a hard time on finding information regarding the present condition of the competition in the market, making it harder for him to compete with the others. This is not only Wagner’s fault for not doing the research, but also upper management’s fault for not informing the employee’s of how to compete with