MGT 304: SALES MANAGEMENT

ASSIGNMENT
“THREE SITUATION ANALYSIS
AND SOLUTION”

Submitted TO SUBMITTED BY
Mr. Pranav Ranjan Amit Kumar
Thakur
Lecturer Reg no
3020070092
LSB Section R17B1
LPU Roll no 22
BBA-MBA [INT.]
7th Semester
 LSB, LPU
1. Assume you are appointed as head of marketing of Sargam Aluminum Company, which is a
new company, manufacturing and marketing Aluminum extruded products such as door, window
and partition aluminum frames, etc. Customer includes household and business organizations.
The factory is located in Hosur district of Tamilnadu about 38 km from Bangalore. You have
discussed with your CEO to initially focus sales and distribution efforts in different region, of the
country. You are required to design sales territories to cover the four southern states. Describe in
detail how would you go about task.

Solution: As the head of marketing of Sargam Aluminum Company, I will design the sales
territories by taking the following steps:-

1. I will allot the basic control units; this is done on the basis of states, cities, areas, etc.
My primary focus is on the four southern states starting from Karnataka to Tamil Nadu.
Hence, my basic control units will be the 4 southern states Karnataka, Madras, Tamil
Nadu and Kerala.

2. The next step I will take is to combine control units. As my initial focus is on sales as
well as on distribution hence I will take try to extract the potential from 1-2 major cities
of each state. Bangalore, Chennai, Hosur and its nearby areas and Cochin and Calicut.
These are the major cities of each state having lots of potential in them. Therefore, in the
initial stages my major focus will be on these cities.

3. Workload analysis will be done now; after deciding the combine control units for the
sales operation, I will analyze the workload from each of these cities. The type of
product sold and the intensity of the market will be two major factors according to
which I will perform this task. Cities having more potential and customers will be
assigned more salespersons so as to extract maximum from the market.

4. The next step that I will take is to assign salesperson to the territories; and this is done
as some salespeople can handle large territories and the travel associated with them; some
can’t. Some territories require experienced salespeople; some are best for new people.
Some people want to live in metropolitan areas; others prefer territories with smaller
cities. Taking all these factors in mind I’ll assign the salespersons and then customer
contact plan will be designed accordingly.

5. The final step will be evaluation and revision of sales territories; as territorial control
is the establishment of standards of performance for the individual territory in the form of
qualitative and quantitative quotas or goals. As the sales team will be achieving all the
 targets allotted and will be able to extract the maximum from the market, I’ll be revising
the territory design with new quotas.

Hence, these all steps I’ll take to design the territories for my company.

2. In the above situation the next task is to assign salespeople to territories. What major criteria
would you keep in mind in assigning salespeople to different territories?

Solution: Assigning right salesperson to different territories is a vital step during designing of
sales territories as some salespeople can handle large territories and the travel associated with
them; some can’t. Some territories require experienced salespeople; some are best for new
people. Some people want to live in metropolitan areas; others prefer territories with smaller
cities. I’ll consider the following two criteria in my mind while assigning salespeople:

1. Relative ability of salespeople which is based on key evaluation factors mentioned

below:

(1) Product knowledge:-

(2) Market knowledge:-

(3) Past sales performance:-

(4) Communication:-

(5) Selling skills:-

2. Salesperson’s effectiveness in a territory, which is decided by comparing social,

cultural, and physical characteristics of the salesperson with those of the territory. The
main objective is to assign right salesperson to the right territory.

3. One sales person from your allocated states have come to your help. They are having a
problem of how to cover the entire state with varying marketing potential of different metros,
cities and districts. How to prepare his route plan and schedule visit, considering the major task
of presale service, face to face selling, sending weekly reports including market information,
collection of payments from dealers as well as business customers, and telephone selling. How
will you help out your juniors, make a detail plan. State allotted: Jharkhand

• Solution: Routing is a travel plan used by a salesperson for making customer calls in a
territory

• Benefits of or Reasons for routing:

• Reduction in travel time and cost

• Improvement in territory coverage

• Importance of routing depends on the application:

• Nature of the product – Important for FMCG

• Type of jobs of salespeople – Important for driver-cum-salesperson job, but

creative selling job needs a flexible route plan

• Identify current and prospective customers on a territory map

• Classify each customer into high, medium, or low sales potential

• Decide call frequency for each class of customers

• Build route plan around locations of high potential customers

• Computerised mathematical models are developed

• Commonly used routing patterns are:

• Scheduling is planning a salesperson’s visit time to customers. It deals with time

allocation issue

• How to allocate salesperson’s time?

 • Sales manager communicates to salesperson major activities and time allocation
for each activity

• Salesperson records actual time spent on various activities for 2 weeks

• Sales manager and salesperson discuss and decide how to increase time spent on
major activities

• Companies specify call norms for current customers, based on sales and profit potentials,
and also for prospective customers