Explain the criteria for sales force deployment decision. Which one is more appropriate for manufacturing & marketing of consumer Electronics Company?

 Effective sales force deployment is composed of three key components:

Optimal sizing of a sales force, Optimal allocation of sales call effort to increase sales or profit response from customers and prospects (often referred to as workload allocation), and Optimal alignment of sales territories to balance workload and minimize travel.

Additional important issues that are beyond the scope of this paper include adjustments to the sales force deployment plan in response to multiple product lines, product life cycles, and dynamic changes over time.Evaluating your current sales force is an important step in the process of deciding whether and how to grow your sales team. If your existing sales force is fine and will be more than adequate to fuel future growth, you can keep the number of people the same and simply add some additional training or perhaps a revamped compensation package. On the other hand, sales force may need to grow by a few heads, or may choose to stay the same size but have different people filling the sales positions. Defiantly, sales force development have certain criteria. It won't require a lot of thought to come up with a good description of what you want your sales force to do.. The key measure when it comes to evaluating a sales force is sales productivity.

Step one in evaluating sales force is to decide what you want it to do for you. For some companies that do most of their selling through mail order or the Internet, a sales force is strictly an option. In this case, you may expect your sales force to handle only the larger accounts, leaving the smaller orders to customer service personnel and order-takers. For other companies, however, the salesperson is the most visible-and perhaps the only--outward manifestation of the company seen by customers. This type of salesperson carries a heavy load. He or she has to uphold the company's image, hold the customers' hands, interface with delivery and repair departments at headquarters, and, of course, get the sale.

The simplest measure of sales productivity is the dollar amount of sales per salesperson. That's easy enough to figure out: Just divide the volume of sales by the number of salespeople on staff. That will give you an average sales productivity figure and let you know how the average salesperson in your organization is doing. More useful, though, is to know how each individual salesperson is doing compared to the average. You may have a handful of relatively productive people who are carrying the load for a raft of underperformers. This is the kind of information you'll need to know to decide whether to make a change.

Be warned, though: Sales productivity may involve more than simply generating dollars of sales. Your sales force may be moving a lot of product now but costing you sales later by alienating customers with poor service. They may be making promises you can't deliver on, overburdening your production and shipping departments. They may be selling a lot of the wrong products (items with low margins or high support costs) while ignoring your more profitable lines. Check to see if certain salespeople have large numbers of returns or tend to sell to customers who don't pass credit checks. These salespeople could be costing you more than they are worth.