Sales Management Practices at Shield Financial Assignment

Sales Management Practices at Shield Financial - Assignment Example In any service or industrial sector, no company can enjoy monopoly; competition always exists. Shield Financial has a major competitor named All-Safe which follows fairly good practices, and Shield Financial also designs and re-designs its products and sales practices in order to compete in a healthy manner. From the case, we have seen that Shield Financial has changed its direction a little in order to stay updated in the competition. Previously, it has always focused on small to medium accounts for generating income, but this time the goal is to target bigger accounts. Focusing on bigger accounts is a challenging task because the sales representatives and managers are quite used to dealing with the small and medium account holders. Shield Financial has named this new approach as the First Plus program. The management practices at Shield Financial are strictly resulted oriented. The senior managers want to achieve the outcomes of the goals they plan out for the company. In the resul t oriented approach, the management determines priorities and ensures that the employees have adequate resources available such as workforce, capacity, and infrastructure. The employees, on the other hand, are given the authority to take personal responsibility for achieving the goals laid down by the senior management. They have to plan out their time, talent and knowledge so that they can deliver results as per the expectations of the management. In our given case, the CEO holds the philosophy that if the employees keep on adding numbers, everything else will take care of itself, meaning if the sales in figures keep coming in, everything will run smoothly. By following the result oriented approach, the management set out the goals for the sales managers to promote the First Plus program as a means to earn revenue. Managers including Doug Bloom find the task challenging because it is difficult to redirect the efforts of the sales staff to just one initiative when they are already w orking hard on their previously set targets. Serving as a sales representative for over four years, Doug Bloom understands that the sales staff will not be happy with the job of taking hold of larger accounts because small accounts are easy to handle and have commission tied up with them too. Furthermore, sales representatives will show clear resentment when the new goal from the corporate would be presented to them. Some might even fail to adopt and resign, so Doug will have to use management skills (such as motivation, encouragement, or non-monetary rewards) to achieve consent and results from his team. This might be a great problem for Doug who is new at the management position.  Ã‚