subject: How To Manage A Change In Culture [print this page] Any Company wanting to maintain operations within the market successfully has to rethink principles of management, even those of the field sales department. This is a favourite topic on many management training courses.
There has been an intensive critical analysis of the changing demands made of managers in the field sales department. One of the issues identified where the causes of the break in the trend of personnel policy lying in four areas:
Technology is changing faster than ever.
Markets are merging demand: Increasingly a large amount of turnover is being made from a declining number of clients.
There has been a serious transformation in population structure: there are fewer younger people and society is becoming top-heavy with older people.
People's values and attitudes are becoming subject to a serious transformation in the direction of post-materialism. (Immaterial values, such as social and environmental values are judged increasingly urgent).
Many companies sales management, is still very much orientated towards traditional values, which does not consider the changed "circumstances".
Therefore, management in the field sales department should be geared towards the following goals:
Profit orientation
Whereas in the past and still nowadays in many companies, profit tended to be/is dealt with as if it were "classified information", nowadays every employee should be fully informed about company profits. Those who are supposed to influence profits should know where the company stands.
Performance orientation
Nowadays, sales departments should dispense with old-fashioned status symbols, such as titles and substitute performance-related assessments in their place.
Market orientation
Here, clients should be the focal point of your considerations.
Co-operative and collaborative style of management
The downside of authoritative managers is that they tend to destroy performance potential. Salespeople will only show commitment to their work if they are allowed to participate in decision-making.
Trust
Excessive supervision and monitoring of salespeople to the point of shadowing can be damamging. Hence the old Chinese saying: "Do not give someone a job if you do not trust them. If you give someone a job, then do not mistrust them."
The principles of management through control which stem from the civil service and the military are now considered by many to be old-fashioned in today's business world.
A system of management which is based on trust is not only more humane, but can also be considerably more efficient. The central focus of this type of management philosophy is information and trust. The main basic principle is to take your sales representatives seriously by informing them quickly, openly and comprehensively.
Management material and quality is a pre-condition for attaining a management position. So how do you translate these management goals into practice?
Management style should be constantly improved. To this end, there should be management training at all levels of the corporate ladder and management behaviour should be one of the key topics covered in meetings with company managers to discuss objectives. Someone has to display managerial qualities and skills before he/she can be appointed to a management position,.
Company hierarchy should be leveled off by eliminating hierarchical levels. Surveys of employees have clearly showed that the vast majority want less quantity and more quality in their work. Typically each manager was directly in charge of an average of four to six employees. This meant that managers were taking the qualitatively better tasks away from their employees since they (the managers) were not being employed at their full capacity and needed to find something to occupy their time. When this phenomenon was analysed at all levels, it was identified that the multiple layers of company hierarchy were actually creating a great deal of extra work.
Changing the salary assessment scale. Abolishing the old assessment criteria of training, age and number of years of service and replacing these with three new criteria:
The value of each employee's position within the company in accordance with the classification of assigned tasks based on a point system.
Performance in the sense of a higher variable salary proportion within the whole company.
Market value - i.e geared towards the amount of money paid to employees in a similar position working for your main competitors.
The world is changing and for companies to continue to succeed they must move with the times. Managing this change is covered on good management training courses.
