Research (Sales Manager)

Demographics
Name: Aamir Ali Industries Worked: Chemical
Title: Area Sales manager Number of Salespeople on Your Team: 8
Age: 26 Years in Current Role: 6 months
Gender: Male Years in Sales: 1 year 3 months
Highest Education: MBA (marketing) Overall Years of Job Experience: 1 year 11 months

Questions
Yash: Can you give me a bit about your personal background and how you got involved in sales?
Aamir: I finished B.Tech from Jadavpur University in 2016, worked for 1 year in an ad agency. Pursued
MBA post that and joined a startup. Based on my performance got involved in sales.

Yash: What are your current responsibilities as a sales manager?

Aamir: I had the responsibility of achieving product and territory wise value and sale targets. This include
tasks like identifying issues affecting sales and taking action to overcome the same, ensuring no market
service gaps exist, appointing distributors as per company policy, identifying new market areas and also
ensuring proper team induction, training, mentoring, feedback.

Yash: How have your responsibilities changed over the years?

Aamir: Working with data has increased and providing insights to the team to execute new activities,
efforts, initiatives in the market to increase sales and distribution.

Yash: How many of your current activities are being affected by technological advances?
Aamir: Data is readily available through dashboards, which allow us to spend more time on analysis than
data preparation. Also, automated order taking for salesmen allows to judge market working compliance,
efficiency. Secondary sales data trends allow us to weed out poor performing retailers.

Yash: If I was to say, automation as it pertains to your current role- what comes to mind?
Aamir: Sales Force Automation has been an integral part, as I have stated already.

Yash: what are the advantages or disadvantages associated with automation?

Aamir: For advantages, I can say that it provides more focus on analysis than preparation, approach is
also more targeted and also there is transparency of sales and overall servicing at distributor level. And
for disadvantages, I think orthodox distributors can face issues in understanding, also technical snags in
systems can sometimes cause delay in business servicing in terms of pending order billing, supply and
stock allocation.

Yash: How many of your current responsibilities are being automated?

Aamir: One is that stock level management at distributor level, what item is needed is automatically
ordered and handled by sales order system. Another one is foot-route tracking of the salesman to ensure
he is doing his job. Then payment to the company by the distributor is also being handled automatically
via banking systems.

Yash: How do your salespeople feel about the level of automation that currently exists within your
organization?
Aamir: For them it’s a welcome addition and development as it gives more time to focus on how to earn
more incentives and less time on handling manual tasks. But the only hassle is some of them still don’t
understand the system due to the complexity.

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Yash: Can you tell us about what automated communications go out to your sales team?
Aamir: Majorly, SMS is sent in terms of whether their respective distributor is punching orders for billing
and using the automation system or not. They also have a portal to understand how much they need to do
in terms of sales and other operational parameters so that they can earn their incentive anytime they want

Yash: What would you say are the reasons that your organization use automated communications in the
sales management process?
Aamir: Basically, to focus more on distribution, increase sales in all brands, make the system more
transparent for all stakeholders bringing in the sense of trust to gain their loyalty. Also to ensure timely
payments.

Yash: How often are you using automated communications with the sales team?
Aamir: It’s used quite frequently. For instance, we provide reminders and data to the team at regular
intervals, also any other decision in terms of brands, schemes and promotions that are done, we send out
messages, emails and reminders to the team to apprise them of the situation.

Yash: What can managers do to further promote sales team positive responses and outcomes to
automated communications?
Aamir: I think making them understand the working, logic and policies behind the communications they
receive will teach them the system better, making them more pro-active and also provide feedback to
keep on improving it.