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"Match Your Sales Force Structure To Your Business Life Cycle"

The document discusses alternative sales force structures for Spectrum Brands following recent acquisitions that have expanded their portfolio. It analyzes maintaining the current structure with independent departments, implementing a functional sales organization, and taking a strategic account approach geographically combined with distribution. The recommendation is a hybrid model using "platform teams" led by business managers to maintain retailer relationships and supported by product experts.

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vipul tuteja
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116 views3 pages

"Match Your Sales Force Structure To Your Business Life Cycle"

The document discusses alternative sales force structures for Spectrum Brands following recent acquisitions that have expanded their portfolio. It analyzes maintaining the current structure with independent departments, implementing a functional sales organization, and taking a strategic account approach geographically combined with distribution. The recommendation is a hybrid model using "platform teams" led by business managers to maintain retailer relationships and supported by product experts.

Uploaded by

vipul tuteja
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Individual Assignment for Session 11

Jaidev Lal

3. “Match Your Sales Force Structure to Your Business Life Cycle”

The Key elements Mr Falconi should be worried about is


 How to Best utilize the sales force keeping in mind the strengths of each brand
 How to leverage synergies and reduce the cost
 Make sure that the consumers receive service in the same fashion if not better
 How sales will not be affected
 To make the sales force work individually for each product line or make the sales force
work together
 Because of Spectrum’s wide variety of offerings, differences in products, logistics, costs,
and profit margins, its current salesforce strategy is not going to be sustainable or not.
 Should they work with collaborators or make their own sales force (i.e. Tetra Division)

Alternative 1: Implement a functional sales organization strategy and increase sales force
size.
Spectrum Brands’ recent acquisitions have created a large and diverse portfolio of brands, which
has resulted in its current sales force having trouble creating synergy across its business units. A
functional sales organization strategy will let management, sales representatives, and
telemarketing agents work together to create synergies that increase business efficiency.  

Advantages:
 This approach will increase specialization and decentralization for the field sales team,
which will assist them for the most crucial and largest accounts when a more creative and
nonroutine sales activity is required.
 Increase in specialization and allows the field sales force to perform sales-generating
activities across its current geographical locations.
 It will also allow for an increase in centralization with upper management being able to
focus on managing accounts instead of both sales and managing.
 Allows the inside telemarketing sales force to focus on repetitive and routine activities
 Will allow for lower specialization for the routine activities and account management
resulting in lower costs for Spectrum Brands.
 Low management to sales representative ratio for a telemarketing sales force.
Disadvantages:
 Will have to outsource accounts to telemarketing agencies, which will increase costs
 Spectrum Brands will have to hire more field representatives and management which will
increase costs
 The increased costs may outweigh the revenue produced because of efficiency across the
business units.
 Does not include staff positions or distributors, which may be needed for some of the
more widely distributed accounts.
 Does not account for the size of each account, which could result in a loss of efficiency
for larger and smaller accounts.
Individual Assignment for Session 11
Jaidev Lal

Alternative 2: Maintain sales force structure, therefore creating distinct and independent
departments with centralized operations
Falconi has the responsibility to manage different brands that sales in different ways to varied
markets that are in different stages of the life cycle. He already has a well-structured salesforce
for Rayovac/Remington and Nu-Gro that acts geographically. The first one has a successful and
dynamic team that minimizes costs but still can work efficiently. The second on the other hand is
struggling to attend the expectations due to the number of products each sale representative has
in accounting. Falconi could leave the Rayovac’s structure untouched and implement the same
concept to Nu-Gro’s but creating new positions such as hiring or promoting employees to be
regional managers. Also, he should hire one manager to take care of the distributors of
Tetra/UPG.

Advantages:
 Creating new positions such as Regional manager would separate, share activities and
responsibilities within employees distributing accountings (larger and smaller)
 Possibly distribute brand portfolios to different sales representatives so they could focus
better on selling to specific accounts
 That would create a healthy competitive environment within representatives to reach their
goals and perhaps get a promotion
 It is important to centralize the operations because each manager would instruct their
representatives to behave in the same way
 Hiring a manager to take care of Tetra’s distributors would allow the managers from
Rayovac/Remington and Nu-Gro to focus solely on their respective activities
Disadvantages:
 The creation of new positions would split the budget in a more equal way, so it could
become more costly to the company
 Individually, the sales representatives would have fewer products to focus on, but as a
result, their salary would be more likely to be based on commissions
 With more employees and a more divided hierarchy, would be necessary investments in
training
 The managers that had the Tetra’s account would receive less too
The disadvantages would be more to the individuals than to the company overall, so Falconi
should be able to restructure the base salaries and bonifications

Recommendation:  Strategic account organization geographically with a combination of


distribution.
In deciding the entire structure, Mr Falconi must consider some of the following points:
 He has limited time and resources with him to spend on the rearrangement of the
structure.
 The extended brand portfolio means that some of his sales reps will have to know about
all the products offered and this could hamper their focus on selling the products.
 Maintaining relationships with the existing channel partners or retailers.
 Creating synergies between the different divisions without boosting costs.
 Training the sales reps on the various products could increase the costs drastically in the
short run.
Individual Assignment for Session 11
Jaidev Lal

He should opt for a combination of merged salesforce & distributors, because if he maintains the
sales force structure it will still be unable to fulfill the requirement of market, so he need a larger
force. And it is also not recommended to maintain a product wise salesforce because it will be a
wastage of human resources. However, in this case he has to give training to all the salesperson
for better understanding of all the product. In this process it may be happen that the turnover
ratio of the salesperson will be increase, he should also focus on that the turnover ratio should
not be very high.

To Create “Platform Teams”, business managers responsible for relationship with retailers &
product expert support the manager during sales

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