Part II - Tools for implementing the process: the command center

Summary

In Part I of this book, we saw that controlling a sales force consists of establishing a set of procedures for supervising, coaching, motivating, evaluating, and compensating salespeople. In other words, sales force control involves all the means that induce salespeople to accomplish the firm's mission in its markets (Anderson and Oliver 1987). As also underlined, from a managerial perspective, the problem of the dynamic management of a sales force can be stated as follows: what are the indicators that sales managers should observe and what are the actions they should take as a result of such observations to induce salespeople to work towards the firm's objectives as closely as possible?

In fact, a process is exerted through all managerial actions taken in the framework of what has been called the sales manager's command center. Training, motivating, coaching, supporting, and compensating salespeople can be conceived as being parts of the sales force management and control tools. Managers have a number of means at their disposal to exert this control. They exert some control on sales effort levels, the sales force organization processes, and all kinds of programs for setting objectives, motivation and increasing competence levels. Part I was essentially descriptive. Part II is more normative. It is comprised of five chapters (Figure II.1).

The first four chapters are devoted to the various programs that constitute sales management's control levers: the programs designed for controlling the level and deployment of the selling efforts in the market (Chapter 7); the programs aimed at influencing salespeople's behaviors, first, under a more or less centralized control approach by providing salespeople with specific objectives (Chapter 8); second, under more decentralized or balanced approaches, by providing salespeople with directional objective and incentive programs (Chapter 9); and those programs that intend to maintain and increase salespeople's competencies (Chapter 10).