Controlling Sales Personnel Through Supervision

The evaluations, or comparisons of actual performances with standards, tempered and adjusted by executive judgment, point the way to needed action. If performance and standards are in alignment the decision may be: no action needed. Otherwise, the three alternatives are

• Adjust performance to the standards, thus increasing the degree of attainment of objectives;
• Revise the policy and/or plan, or the strategies used for their implementation, to fit better the achievement of objectives.
• Lower or raise the objectives or the standards and/criteria used in measuring their degree of attainment to make them more realistic.

The actions resulting from these decisions, in turn, are conditioned by the executive’s judgment, experience, knowledge of the situation, and administrative skill.

Management also controls sales personnel through supervision. Regardless of who does the supervising, the objective is to improve the job performances of sales personnel. The executive with supervisory responsibilities establishes working relations with sales personnel for purposes of observing, evaluating, and reporting on performance; correcting deficiencies; clarifying responsibilities and duties; providing motivation; informing sales personnel of changes in company policy; helping to solve business and personal problems; and continuing sales training. Clearly, sales supervision is concerned mainly with the action phase of control-action aimed at enhancing personnel contributions to the achievement of objectives.

How much supervision is enough? Too much is as bad as too little. It is difficult to prescribe how much supervision is enough, but there are some conditions under which supervision is needed. Among these conditions are:

• Sales personnel turnover rate excessive in a branch, district, or other organizational unit
• High turnover of accounts.
• Increased complaints from customers.
• Mail or phone orders increasing for no known reasons.
• Low ratio of orders to sales calls.
• Total number of calls very low or very high.
• Increasing ratio of selling expenses to sales in an organizational unit.
• Low morale, as implied by negative attitude toward company, lack of enthusiasm, signs of restlessness and job hunting.

These conditions can trace to the wrong kind of supervision as well as to too much or too little supervision. While this list is useful for appraising the effectiveness of sales supervision, those doing the appraising must recognize that many of these conditions may have their roots in deficiencies in other phases of sales force management. It sometimes happens, too, that a company upgrades the quality of its sales personnel and fails to adjust the pattern of supervision. The selling task in many companies has changed so that it is now high-level, key account selling, and this demands independent, self-reliant, highly educated sales personnel who can and must make their own decisions! When management brings in highly trained and self- reliant people to meet the new selling challenge, traditional supervision and the attitudes that underlie it-stifles those whom management seeks to encourage: What worked for so long is wrong for the more dynamic assignment of the newer type of person. The type of supervision, in other words, should be adjusted to the type of person in the selling job- when the type of person changes, so should the type of supervision.

Who Should Supervise?

Depending upon the company and its organization, sales personnel may be supervised by

• Home office personnel,
• Branch or district managers,
• Field sales supervisors.

Put another way, sales supervision may be either through executives as one of their job responsibilities, or through specialists whose jobs are mainly supervising. If the sales force is small and experienced, sales supervision is generally through the top sales executive or an assistant. Necessarily, control through home office supervision is minimal, but it may be enough, especially when the sales organization is small and permits the development of close relations among sales personnel and executives and when little sales training is required.

Companies having decentralized sales organizations sometimes assign the supervision responsibility to branch or district managers. Customarily promoted from the ranks, branch managers are presumably well prepared to supervise; field sales personnel. However, even in companies with elaborate field sales organization, limitations exist on the amount of supervi- sion that branch managers: should exercise. In practice, the branch manager is often a local general manager more than a specialized sales executive and in this capacity is responsible for the local conduct of all the company’s affairs, not only for managing sales personnel but for warehousing, extending credit and making collections, providing service, and performing other work. Branch managers spend most of their time attending to details, so it is unusual for them to devote much time to personal supervision of sales personnel. But they should spend some time. Especially when branch managers have large numbers of sales personnel under them, the time they can spend with each one is limited, and, as is true of supervision emanating from the home office, they rely mainly upon sales personnel to supervise themselves.