Question

Topic: Strategy

Organization Strructure Help

Posted by Anonymous on 6/30/2010 at 2:47 AM ET 250 Points
Hi

I am working for a logistic company as organization development manager in Turkey. We have many ofices in Germany,France,Italy, Hungary and Romania.
I try to ımprove sales department performance but have some questions to ask you. We have customers who have yearly agreement and active customers who ask prices for each transportation. My sales team spend much of their time to reply mails and following this customers. Beause of this reason sales team do not concantre neither customers nor crm of existing customers.

I want to re-organize my sales department for focusing international sales and domestic sales but first i have to create free time for sales department to focus other areas. Do you have any suggestion ?

Best Regards
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 6/30/2010 at 7:37 AM Author
    We have web interface but this was not prefered by our customers. Our customers generally contact directly to our salespeople.

    Logistic market trends move from yearly agreement to oppurtunistic customers because of flexible prices and intense competition so oppurtunistic customers has great share in our turnover. The biggest problem we do not have enough sales specialist and our general manager does not want to loose one of our sales specialist for responding mails and also tihs idea was not accepted by sales team.

    Now i decide to organize new department to manage this kind of oppurtunistic customers who has minimum 3 orders and trust our company. I expect to delegation of this kind of customers from sales to this new department and create free time for them. Do you think it works ? How shoud i reorganize sales perfromance criteria ?
  • Posted by michael on 7/1/2010 at 6:56 AM Accepted
    Sales people tend to focus on 2 things:
    1) What is easiest
    2) What makes the most money for them.

    The 2 should be mutually exclusive. If you base your pay program on NEW customers, they'll find a way to make more calls...or quit.

    If they are quitters, then I'd suggest you change the structure and make them inside sales people who don't get paid as much.

    Michael
  • Posted by Chris Blackman on 7/4/2010 at 5:11 PM Accepted
    I'm intrigued by your sentence "Because of this reason sales team do not concantre neither customers nor crm of existing customers."

    Did you mean your team is not concentrating on acquisition of new customers, nor on managing the accounts of existing customers?

    Perhaps if you have not already done so your reorganisation should split sales from operations so the freight gets shipped smoothly and efficiently regardless of how much sales activity is happening.

    Next - offer new customers an account manager who will help them with their freight business. You need to make things as easy as possible for the customer to keep using you. Supply them with special consignment note stationery so they can start to do the basic paperwork to make that process easy.

    If you're not following the transactions of each customer to monitor their contributions to your profits, split up your P & L income accounts and give each customer an identifying code so at the end of each financial period you can review which customers are most profitable. Manage carefully the customers who are of most value to your business.

    Why are customers asking for quotes for every shipment? Create a guide book for them so they can work out for themselves what each transaction will cost if they absolutely must. Explain you have negotiated contract rates on their behalf so there doesn't have to be a negotiation for each and every shipment. Lock in their rates for a three/six/twelve month period if you can so they can do whatever they do in the confidence their freight rates will not change (fuel surcharges, a fact of life these days, excepted).

    Above all, take time out to understand your customer's businesses. Only be making them feel your agency is a true business partner will you gain their trust and repeat business without question or comparison of competitive pricing.

    Lastly - avoid the most price-sensitive customers. There is always someone out there willing to undercut your price. Beat them with superior service!
  • Posted on 7/5/2010 at 4:31 AM Author
    We have already split our operations and sales department and also we have customer representatives who are responsible for following customers load and also inform them about their load status. Sales departmant delegate responsibility to customer representatives after signed the contract with customers.

    Customer always ask for quotes because price are so flexible and most of the customers are price sensetive rather than service quality. We have both spot customers who always ask for quote for each transportation and yearly agreement customer.

    One of our bggest problem is sales peapole interest in so much operation and have diffuculty to delagate customers to representatives. They think they will loose their customer when they have suffer problema about operation so this cause to waste so much time to each customer and miss new customer oppurtunuties.

    Now i try to put some performance criteria to focus on more new customers and try to improve operation department about general problems.

    Can performance criteria lead people to focus other subjects ?
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