Sales and Distribution Management

Hiring and Training Sales Personnel : Overview

Reimbursement for the sales expenses incurred by such sales persons is yet another cost which has to be borne by the company. A greater area of concern is the opportunity cost that is involved in hiring an unsuitable candidate for a position and missing out on the profits that could have been generated by the company by hiring a competent person instead.

An ineffective salesman can cause great damage to the company's reputation due to his poor product knowledge, failure to serve the customer properly and poor selling techniques which only tend to alienate the customers. Companies seek specific characteristics in a potential salesperson. These characteristics are clubbed together into two categories - mental aptitude dimensions, and personality dimensions. The mental aptitude dimensions of salespersons include mental alertness, business terms and memory recall aptitude, communication skills, numerical ability and mechanical interest.

The personality dimensions, on the other hand, include honesty or character strength, sociability, cynicism, high energy levels, dominance, competitiveness, emotional maturity, work habits, and work motivation. Salespersons are hired on the basis of the satisfactory fulfillment of a company's requirements. The selection process for hiring a salesman involves a number of stages. These include sourcing the candidates, screening the candidates, conducting the selection test, holding personal interviews, checking letters of recommendations, conducting reference checks, physical examination, and making the employment offer.

Once a suitable candidate has been hired for the position of a salesman, the candidate needs to be properly trained to increase his effectiveness and productivity in selling. Sales training is of four types - initial sales training, refresher or follow-up training, training offered by the manufacturer to the sales force of its distributor and training offered by the manufacturer to its customers. Sales training offers several benefits, both to the sales persons as well as to the organization. These benefits range from decrease in sales force turnover, enhanced morale of the sales force, to improved company image and customer relations.

Sales training programs consist of three components: designing the training program, implementing the training program and evaluating the training program. The designing of training programs should be done keeping in view the organizational objectives. However, a company's efforts must not just end with designing a training program to achieve its objectives. The company must also take measures to implement the training program effectively so that it helps the company achieve its objectives. The implementation of the training program takes into consideration issues such as - Selecting the right trainer, timing of training, place of training, etc.

Looking at the large amount of expenditure that companies incur to train their sales force, evaluation of training programs becomes essential to justify this expenditure and to objectively examine whether the training programs have been successful in accomplishing their objectives. Kirkpatrick's four-stage model of sales force training evaluation is the most widely used method of evaluating training programs and evaluates the training program on four levels, namely, reactions, knowledge acquisition, behavior change/ transfer of learning, and organizational outcomes.

Chapter 11 : Overview