Deployment of Industrial Sales Force

Deployment of sales force involves taking certain decisions like what

should be the size of the sales force, how the territory has to be designed,
how the selling effort has to be organized and allocated. Sales force play a
vital role in industrial marketing as they help in proliferation of marketing
concept. Their ability to negotiate in this field and their search for new
ways of marketing the products makes them the best people to judge
the various alternatives methods as they deal with potential customers.
They have immense talent of negotiating and coordinating with various
departments and also the ability of effectively using the exiting product
in alternative ways. Their ideas and suggestions play an important role in
developing, improving and customizing the existing products.

Industrial Selling Environment

As industrial selling is specifically to organizational buyers who exhibit varied behaviors during
the buying process, the industrial environment becomes more complex. This necessitates the
industrial marketers to respond to such environment with proper planning, organizing,
influencing and controlling their sales efforts. They need to identify their potential buyers and the
main decision makers among them, give them a sales presentation, and then develop a
continuous rapport.
A typical buying process entails more than one organizational member who provides input into
decision making. Though a specialist or an agent is given the buying responsibility, they get
influenced in the process. Their internal environment of the organization like the production,
marketing, finance etc, and external environment like the government, technological changes
etc, play a vital role in influencing their behavior.

Deciding on the size of the sales force

It is very important to have an ideal sales force team as it directly affects the company sales and
costs. Most of the companies follow the workload approach method to determine the sales force
size. There are various methods of deciding on the size of the sales force, these are namely the
following;
➢ Judgemental Method
➢ Incremental Method
➢ Sales Potential Method
➢ Workload Method

A few words about each will be worth enriching the students. Judgemental Method is said to
have been used when a veteran salesperson has been requested to state the size based on his
or her experience. Such sales person uses a heuristic approach is calculating a volume of
business( in terms of units or volume) based on his experiential learning and then opinionates
the number of sales people to be required. The ‘Incremental Method’ the approach states that
the total business market is fixed for any territories are fixation of additional sales person should
be viable as long as incremental profit flows. The point at which the incremental profit becomes
negative the recruitment of salesperson should be stopped. The incremental profit is the
concept of marginal profit (marginal revenuemarginal cost). This method is applicable in a
trading unit or trading situation which is existing. ‘Sales Potential Method’ deliberates that on an
average a sales person is able have a certain productivity and this when has to address the
total potential of sales considering the sales force turnover will state the size actually required.