Baria Planning Solutions, Inc.: Fixing the Sales Process Case Solution

2. What factors contributed to the company’s decision to organize the sales team by industry?

i. What factors contributed to the company’s decision to organize the Sales Support group in a hybrid structure?

The initial setup of the company did not support a hybrid structure. However, more recently, there has been support as well as implementation of the hybrid structure in the Sales Support group. The decision was taken due to a number of important factors. Firstly, direct support for each industry-specific division was judged as more meaningful to respond to the individual needs of each sector of the market and stay focused on the industries the company was serving.

Secondly, Sales Support function was concerned about higher investments, which were going into the function in terms of staff deployed. Since sales opportunities have not been fully availed and the success rate is declining, the function had to devise ways to focus on each of the customer segments (or industries in this case) that the company was catering to. Moreover, the 2008 downturn has put increasing pressure on cost-cutting which is why the Sales Support was restructured into a hybrid form to try improving its effectiveness.

ii. What aspects of the sales processes are most valued by customers?

Several aspects are of value to the customers and potential customers of BPS. Firstly, organizations that meet sales proposal deadlines have a better repute with the customers. Currently, timely submission of proposals is a severe problem at BPS which hampers a good repute with the customers. Secondly, customers value a more long-term arrangement with each vendor they work with. Hence, each organization and its sales functions have to be efficient and prepared to respond to and assist the customers for several years.

Moreover, customers prefer retention of contracts with the same vendors due to level of trust and higher expectations due to previous relationship. Customers of BPS also expect cost reductions wherever possible to strike a good deal. However, they also value performance guarantees along with cost reductions. Since BPS is providing them solutions, performance guarantees have to be there in the wake of increasingly large number of firms operating in the industry.

3. What alternatives are available for dealing with the problems in the Sales Support group?

i. How did you evaluate the alternatives?

The alternatives have to be evaluated while keeping in mind that interests that serve the customer requirements are of top priority. Firstly, it must be noted that New Sales support requests are highest among the types of support required by the customers. Hence, one alternative is to organize sales support by division. Industry-specific divisions would help to focus on each industry more effectively. There is already positive advocacy for hybrid structure, which means that the function has some sense of responding to the requirements of each industry.

Currently, Sales Support teams are shared across sales divisions. If they are not shared across divisions and each division has its own sales support, the teams would develop a sense of urgency to get the work done for its division as now each sales support team would be focused on one division only. The key here is to gauge that which tactic would improve the performance of data analysts, data engineers, proposal support team, as well as the pricing team.

ii. What actions should Christy Connor propose to Brandon Ali?

Christy Connor should first propose that the manufacturing sector needs immediate attention as it has the highest sales support requests in a given year. Therefore, Christy should recommend that each significant industry, including the manufacturing sector, should have its own sales division, consisting of sales support, analysts, and pricing experts. Moreover, Brandon Ali in the future should focus primarily on Pilots and New Sales as there is considerable under-utilization of resources and these are two aspects of sales which hold a lot of potential in the future.

Furthermore, since staffing is dependent on the number of contracts (both new and for renewal), Connor needs to recommend the staffing figure, cutting down on the staff where necessary, to improve the efficiency of the organization. As pointed out in the case that the sales support workforce is currently under-utilized, hence, more staff does not need to be hired. Rather, Connor should go for a staff reduction.