The Analysis of the Personal Selling Function - Essay Example

I. Introduction The success of any task or job depends upon the effectiveness as well as the efficiency of the person performing that particular taskor job. To a very large degree, it can be rightly said that recruiting the right people for the right job and ensuring person-job fit can essentially result in the success of an organization. However, saying that is easier said than done. In most organizations, a lot of time and resources are spent on finding the right personal and same is the case with finding the people who make up an organization’s salesforce. According to (Goodman 1982) recruiting the top sales producers has long been a major concern of top sales organization. For sales managers it is a very difficult task to select the people who will turn out to be great at what they do. Over the years a lot of scholarly work and research has been conducted about the recruitment processes that will ensure person-job fit at the managerial levels but very little attention has been paid on emphasizing and devising a proper strategy that ensures that the right people are hired on a sales force. According to Cravens et al (1997) one of the main marketing expenditures in the business-to-business marketplace is the field sales force and even then, little is done to make absolutely sure that the right people are hired on sales forces. II. Importance of Evaluating potential sales people: According to Rich and Smith (2000) “The greater the skill used in evaluating potential salespeople, the more effective will be the hiring process; effectiveness being measured by lower turnover and greater productivity over an extended period of time”. Most organizations pay little or no attention on a standardized recruitment procedure that ensures that the right sales people are selected for the jobs even though most researches show that higher sales are generated by salespeople who are motivated and well-suited for their job. For organizations whose work centers around retailing of products and services, their sales force plays the most important of tasks of determining its success. Fort a better, more well-matched person to be inducted into a company’s sales force, it has been observed that a better recruitment process is necessary. III. Recruitment Policies for Sales people: According to Pitt and Ramasheshan (1995),“In the sales force recruitment process in most organizations, the organization’s requirements are typically positioned as the primary consideration”. Which generally means that more emphasize is laid on generalizing the demands of the organization so as to attract a larger number of people to apply for the jobs. This ensures a wider pool of applicants and much more variety to choose from. The idea however, should be that the organization must provide much more realistic and less generalized information concerning the job and the company so that it facilitates the applicants in a making a better judgment about whether their skills and requirements match those of the organization. According to the authors, this can mean that the number of potential future unsatisfied sales people can be reduced because by providing the applicants the necessary realistic information about the company, many people will decide not to apply if the find themselves unsuitable for the job or if they find the job too demanding or the remunerations not enough to their liking or having any other unwanted attributes (Pitt & Ramasheshan 1995). This lays the ground for an important fact and that is that instead of focusing on devising a particular strategy through which sales managers can ensure that they select the right people to add on to their sales force, they generally attempt on first securing a large number of applicants that have applied for their advertised job and then having done that they sort through the applicants provided information and choose those that seem most likely to perform better. This is a method that can in no way ensure the realistic ability of a person to generate revenue for the company in the form of sales, and due to that most organizations suffer with a sales force that is less effective than they would like to have. IV. Problems associated with lack of a standardized recruitment procedure: The lack of having a standardized recruitment procedure for induction of sales people is a major cause of turnover at these job positions. There are many people who start a job and after a month or so of work realize that they are no good at it or it is not exactly what they though it was. As pointed out before, a major reason for this is the improper dissemination of information that causes the wrong people to apply for a particular job that has a particular work description. This turnover can be a major cause of disruption at work and in the sales as the company loses precious time and resources that it wasted in training the individual that is now leaving them .Also hiring that person cost money in the terms of advertisements that were given out for the hiring and by leaving, that person is essentially adding to the company’s burden as it will now have to spend some more so that it can replace the leaving candidate. In general, this turnover may stem from a number of things that sales managers and companies may be doing apart from not giving out enough information. According to Shepherd (1995). In any hiring decision it is best to know as much about the candidate. For this purpose application forms, reference checks and interviews are often the best way to obtain this information. Interviews in particular play a very important part in most recruitment processes that organizations employ when they are seeking new people to induct into their sales force. This however turns sour when there is little planned strategy to the interviews because according to the author interviews are particularly difficult because . Even the most structured interview will often contain some extemporaneous elements and spontaneous follow-up. As a result, it is often difficult for the sales manager to avoid comments that may be interpreted as discriminatory(Shepherd 1995). For this it is suggested that any such comments are minimized and the interview is properly planned with a lot more focus on job-related questions. According to the author this proper planning may include carefully reviewing the job description and the job qualifications, as well as reviewing all material available concerning the applicant. Often a résumé or reference letter will provide the answers to questions such as age, marital status, etc., taking away the need to ask such questions in the interview. Further, a focus on job-related questions will reduce the tendency for the interviewer to stray into questionable areas that may lead to discrimination charges.(Shepherd 1995) V. Analysis of Various Hiring Procedures These are some of the ways that organizations can make sure that they do not scare off potential candidates when they are looking to add on more people to their sales force. But it still does not ensure that the right people are in fact selected at the end of the day. Most organizations these days do not hire people on subjective criteria but make the decisions on objective criteria (Cornway 1987). The sales mangers use pre-employment testing of the applicant’s mental abilities to see if the person is right for the particular job and if he/she will perform well in the position. For achieving the maximum benefits organizations should keep the scope of their work in mind while making up these quantitative analysis tools and make sure that they are efficient in making the sales managers help make the right judgment about the sales generating abilities of most individuals, and in doing so, select the right person for the job. Doing so proves to be beneficial for organizations in the long run because by making such a standard tool for analyzing the prospective applicants will take the company one step closer to devising the right recruitment strategy for sales people. However, even though the tests have been found to have high predictive validity, many sales managers still continue to under estimate their usefulness in selecting successful salespeople (Churchill et al 1990). Although it can rightly be argued that the requirements for success vary greatly between types of sales jobs. However, tests can be very useful in measuring the traits that are important in the specific sales position and according to As Churchill et al caution, tests should only focus on abilities or traits that are relevant to the sales position and by ensuring that they are, organizations are essentially helping themselves towards selecting the right people for the right job. Another important factor of choosing the right sales person is determining the “peoples-skill” of that person prior to hiring him/her.This puts light on the fact that it is extremely crucial to be able to identify those people who are good at adapting to the needs of their workplace and who are good at molding their personalities according to the personalities of those that they meet. This helps these sales people in being more persuasive than other people and helps them secure more sales. This is an attribute that can ban be observed during the hiring practice. It was also found that the date collected during hiring practices predicted sales force performance accurately over 30 percent of the time. The top performing sales forces had very different hiring practices from low-performing sales forces. According to El-Ansary et al (1993), research has turned out that low performing sales managers tend to look outside the company while hiring and did not emphasize on employee references whereas the top-performers tend to look within the company for their sales recruits. For any organization the basic goal is not only to find the right candidate but to do so in the fastest of manners and at the lowest of economical cost (El-Ansary et al 1993). T o do so, many organizations employee strategies that are cost effective and fast but they do not necessarily result in successful selection of the perfect candidate that are most suitable for the job. To ensure that this does not happen, these companies should pay a lot of attention on making it clear to the prospective applicants about what it is that they are looking for and what it is exactly that they are offering. By providing relevant information a company will have a greater chance to choose the right person and in return create a business relation that actually lasts and that is equally beneficial for both the employer and the employee. VI. Conclusion : In the end, it can easily be concluded that with all the evidence that comes to us in the form of expert opinions arrived at through careful research, it has been found over and over again that salespeople who are right for their jobs are happier, much more satisfied with their work and generally perform much better than any other employees and their performance is directly related to whether or not they fit at the work that they do and how much it suits their personality. According to Avery and Campion (1982), the best way to ensure, at the end of the initial screening process and the interview would include each candidate short listed accompanying a salesperson during a typical day in the field. This approach will serve two main purposes. First, it will allow the salesperson a greater opportunity to get to know the applicant and evaluate his/her potential contribution to the sales team. Secondly, this approach will provide the candidate with a very realistic preview of the sales position. Also, as the sales staff must work as a cohesive team this initial interaction with participative input will encourage teamwork among the staff. It can also be safely said to effectively reach a balance where there is no turnover in the sales force, an organization should pay extra attention on recruiting those people who are most suitable for the particular job description and that of course is only possible through a proper and standardized sales people recruitment procedure. References Adell. El-Ansary, Noël B. Zabriskie and John M. Browning (1993). Sales Teamwork: A dominant strategy for improving sales force effectiveness. Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing. Vol. 8. No. 3. pp 65-72. Avery, R.D. and Campion, J.E. (1982), The Employment Interview: A Summary and Review of Recent Research, Personnel Psychology, Vol. 35, pp.736-65. Churchill, G.A., Jr., Ford, N.M. and Walker, O.C. (1990), Sales Force Management: Planning, Implementation, and Control, Irwin, Homewood, I1., Conway, J.M. (1987),“Title VII and competitive testing”, The Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 15. Cravens. David W. Neil A. Morgan & Nigel F. Percy.(1997), Sources of effectiveness in the business to business sales organizations. Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science. Vol 3. No. 1. pp 43-69. Goodman, C. S. (1972). Management of the Personal Selling Function. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York. Pitt. Leyland .F & B. Ramasheshan. Realistic job information and sales force turnover: an investigative study. Journal of Managerial Psychology. Vol 10. No. 5. pp 29-36. Rich, Michael .K & Daniel C. Smith. (2000). Determining relationship skills of prospective salespeople. Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing. Vol 15. No. 4. pp 242-259. Shepherd. David. C. (1995). Discrimination issues affecting the selection of salespeople in the United States. International Journal of Manpower. Vol.16. No. 4. pp 57-69. Shepherd, David. C., Marilyn N. Helms and Paula J. Haynes.(1991). A comprehensive Selection Process: The key to Sales-force Retention. International Journal of Manpower. Vol.12.No.1. pp18-21. Read More