Good Essay About Sales Force Empowerment Program

Executive Summary

Customer relationship management is about the practices, approaches and tools that organizations use to manage, record, and appraise interactions with customers in a bid to initiate rapid sales growth by expanding and elevating relationships with their main customer bases. The current business environment has become very competitive and, therefore, requires a change of ideas and strategy. As such, sales force becomes an important aspect for companies that keep close interactions with their customers. This has made it necessary to develop a sales force empowerment program. The program will equip the company's field salespeople with the necessary skills and expertise to retain the company's profitable customers (Winer & Dhar, 2011). The skills and expertise earned through the program will also help in attracting new potential customers to the company and boost sales volume. A sales force empowerment program that entails the following steps is necessary.

Proposal for Sales Force Empowerment Program

There should be a precise description of tasks and responsibilities for each sales person. Each one of them should also know the top management's expectations from them.
An effective sales force team should understand the mission, vision, and objectives of the company. That should, therefore, be clearly stated to them.
The district sales manager needs to make strategic decisions that will facilitate the achievement of the set objectives. It is, therefore, my responsibility in this regard to achieve the goals set by the top management.

There should be a precise definition of authority in order to encourage individual sales people to accomplish their assigned tasks.

The sales force teams need to have a clearly known budget. They should be aware of the amount of resources that are available for their use within a specified time frame.
Build a cohesive team that is very effective. The teams will be fully equipped with the necessary skills to carry out their task and achieve goals.

Each team will have a defined geographical coverage area.

Each team will have a clearly known team leader whose responsibilities are known.
This program will create three teams that will cover the three regions where our most profitable customers are located, i.e. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. A team will have ten members whose leaders will report directly to the district sales manager. The district sales manager will be providing regular briefings, feedback and any necessary support to the teams. Teams work successfully when they are fully bonded and motivated. To initiate the bonding and motivate the teams, the district sales manager's office will organize a team building trip to Washington. During the trip, the team members will stay together, bond and know each other's strengths and weaknesses. Different responsibilities will be shared with the teams depending on the members' strengths and weaknesses. Team leaders will brief me every two months on the progress made and potential new customers for the company.
The use of sales people in teams is a good strategy for implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Managing customer relations is of utmost importance, and that can only be emphasized by the amounts of resources that organizations have invested in the practice (Buttle, 2009). Training sales force teams to also use the online platforms to manage customer relations will be one of the key objectives of the empowerment program. A fully trained online team of sales people will have been empowered to enhance the company’s market share by generating more sales.

References

Buttle, F. (2009). Customer relationship management. Amsterdam: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Winer, R., & Dhar, R. (2011). Marketing management. Boston: Prentice Hall.