Sales Management and Practices

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Requirement

Part A: You were recently promoted to a sales manager position for ABC Company, which offers customized software for physicians, dentists, and veterinarians. Unfortunately, you’re now the sales manager for one of your company’s least productive regions. After several weeks on the job, you become concerned about the high rate of turnover. Three salespeople have resigned within the last two months. Replacements are needed and there’s little time to hire, train, and deploy them in the field. 
Realizing that the right people for these positions could come from a variety of places, you decide to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of hiring from within the organization, through referrals, and by using advertising methods. What are your opinions on the following?

1.What are two (2) advantages and two (2) disadvantages of hiring internal candidates for sales positions?
2.What are two (2) benefits of hiring people referred to the company by friends or relatives?
3.Discuss one (1) difference between the kinds of applicants that will come in from a newspaper ad versus postings on online job boards. Does this difference indicate anything about future job performance?

Part B: Once your selection has been made, you move to the next step – training. Please respond to the following:

1.How is sales training related to recruiting and selecting salespeople? 
2.How can sales training contribute to salesforce socialization?
3.What four (4) methods are used for delivering sales training?

Solution

Sales management and practices

Introduction 

This paper is a combination of two different parts. Each part is satisfying the requirements of different questions. These questions are giving significant information about the training and hiring procedure within an organization. Generally, it can be said that the hiring and training is an important part of an organization. The efficiency of both maintains profitability and effective working scenario in the workplace.

Part A

Answer 1

Bidwell (2015) said that the internal hiring is a right option to hire talented staff as per required context. The internal hiring comes with both advantages and some disadvantages also. The below-mentioned are some advantages and disadvantages of internal hiring that will enforce better decision for salesperson selection:
Advantages

• Reduce the overall cost of recruitment

• Enhance reputation among eyes of existing workers

• Provide an opportunity to hire talented employees. 

Disadvantages

• The first disadvantage is the creation of conflict among colleagues.

• Limited options in front of management to hire better and talented employees.

Answer 2

The ABC Company have a great option of hiring the required candidates from referral method. With the help of this hiring method, the company can gain a lot of benefits that further maintain the fluency of its working as well as a competitive advantage within existing industry. The following are some benefits that organization can derive from friends or relatives referral:
Save time to hire the right candidate: The referral method gives an opportunity to an employer to save its hiring time (Fox, 2015). In today's scenario, no one has much time period to focus on hiring activities. Therefore, it will be a right option which facilitates high time safety than others.
Create an Engaged Workforce: Permitting recent workers to hire their family members or friends for open positions within the company is a powerful way to develop an engaged workforce. 

Answer 3

There are a large number of option that can use widely for recruitment purpose. If the company decide to hire through newspaper and online job boards, there will be some difference among identified candidates. The first and foremost difference between the kinds of the applicant that will come in from a newspaper ad and postings on online job boards is quality of knowledge. It means that the candidate who is coming through the online job board will have more information about the working scenario of the company and its job profile (Keller, 2017). On the other hand, the candidate who has come through newspaper advertisement does not have significant knowledge about job offers. This difference between both kinds of candidates indicates that the company will get high profit through online job portal candidate and low profit from a newspaper advertisement. It happens due to lack of working knowledge of both candidates.

Part B

Answer 1

There is a strong relationship between the sales training, recruitment, and selection of the desired candidate. These three processes play an important role in bringing together human resources as well as organizations (Bodin, 2017). The recruitment and selection provide the window through which firms gain access to able and willing human resources. On the other hand, training provides the avenue by which firms harness and develop talents for strategic purposes. 

Answer 2

The sales training contribute to Salesforce socialization through developing coordination and familiarity among members. The training will teach the lesson to listen to others and share their viewpoint with each other (Padek, 2015). This further develops socialization behavior between each member of the training session.

Answer 3

The sales training can provide to the selected candidates by using a large number of sources. The first and foremost source is practical training. According to this training method, the organization can teach hired employees through a live demo and practical sessions. This will deliver long-lasting knowledge among individuals. On the other hand, another method is traditional training. It can provide through the use of traditional methods like a seminar, coaching, and mentor (Padek, 2015). The below-mentioned are some ways of delivering training to salespersons:

• Use of E-Learning to educate: It is necessary for the Salespersons to understand product details to boost their confidence when selling, especially new recruits. This can successfully perform through the use of E-learning sources. With the help of E-training, they can get significant product's details as well as client issues so that presentation can perform in required context. 

• Coaching: The second method is coaching. The salesperson should have enough knowledge about how to behave at client worksite, and ethical considerations (Miyato, 2016). This can successfully learn from salesperson through attending coaching classes.

• Practical Sessions: Another important coaching method is the use of practical sessions. The practical session is essential for the salesperson to learn required behavior. With the help of practical sessions, the sales trainer can learn effectively with experiences of others.

• Use of Micro Learning Methods: The last and final sales training method is the use of micro-learning methods. It means that the ABC organization need to share knowledge among trainers through personal experiences as well as popular examples. Micro-learning ensures the best learning and consumes little time of training team.

References 

• Bidwell, M., & Mollick, E. (2015). Shifts and ladders: Comparing the role of internal and external mobility in managerial careers. Organization Science, 26(6), 1629-1645.

• Bodin, D., Schmidt, J. P., Lemle, R. B., Roper, B. L., Goldberg, R. W., Hill, K. R., ... & Siegel, W. (2017). Recruitment and Selection in Health Service Psychology Postdoctoral Training: A Review of the History and Current Issues. Training and Education in Professional Psychology.

• Fox, S. (2015). An examination into the importance of recruitment and selection in a business; should it be considered an internal HR function or outsourced to a specialist? (Doctoral dissertation, Dublin, National College of Ireland).

• Keller, J. R. (2017). Posting and Slotting: How Hiring Processes Shape the Quality of Hire and Compensation in Internal Labor Markets. Administrative Science Quarterly, 0001839217736045.

• Miyato, T., Dai, A. M., & Goodfellow, I. (2016). Adversarial training methods for semi-supervised text classification. arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.07725.

• Padek, M., Brownson, R., Proctor, E., Colditz, G., Kreuter, M., Dobbins, M., ... & Pfund, C. (2015, December). Developing dissemination and implementation competencies for training programs. In Implementation Science (Vol. 10, No. S1, p. A39). BioMed Central.