Bright Ideas to Solve Your Toughest Management Challenges


LAINE CHROUST EHMANN


Management has its headaches: demanding customers, competi- tion in the market, unrealistic expectations from the boardroom. And then there are the reps – at least some of them. Well, at least you’re not alone. All sales managers face challenges all the time. That’s a fact.


How can you cope better with the challenges of managing a sales


force? Here, select sales managers share their experiences, advice, and solutions for everything from hiring to firing.


Situation #1: Growing Pains Hiring staff is always an anxiety-producing event. Balancing the need to fill the empty spot with the desire to hire the right person has caused more than one case of indigestion. Now, multiply that angst by, oh…say, 30 or 40. Then you’ll know the pressure Diego DelVecchio was under as he attempted to expand his team to mul- tiples of its previous size.


“Our biggest struggle was determining the ideal number of new salespeople to hire for our new products,” says DelVecchio, a direc- tor of sales for a Canadian pharmaceutical company. “We had 22 salespeople who represent three medications and we were launch- ing four new medications in five therapeutic areas. We needed to decide which doctors to target, how much crossover existed with our current business, how many new reps we needed to hire, and what their territory and delimitations would look like,” he explained. “It was critical that we staffed in a manner that would allow us to capture as much of these new markets as possible while, at the same time, making sure that we did not hire too many people,” he explained. To create a staffing plan that would fit their current needs and scale for the future, DelVecchio did the following: • Set the parameters. For staffing needs projections to be as accurate as possible, DelVecchio set initial assumptions and guide- lines. The three factors that were included in his analysis were the current prescription volumes in the markets they were entering, the historic cost of a salesperson, and the market share expectations for each new medication. Once those elements were entered into a database, DelVecchio says they could run different scenarios to see how different product mixes and market-share projections would affect staffing levels. • Look at the good and the bad. It’s easy for sales managers to fall into the sunny-side-up trap and ignore the possibility that the fu- ture may not be as rosy as you might hope. To come to a realistic – and probably more accurate – result, you need to take a pessimist’s viewpoint, if only for a few minutes. While it’s unlikely you will have to deal with the bottom falling out, it’s best to do the math so you know where the bottom is. “Initial estimates ranged from hiring 40


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