IMAGINATIVE STAFFING, INC.
“I’m not sure what’s going on around me right now, but it seems as if somebody is trying to tell me something.” Angie Roberts, CEO of Imaginative Staffing, Inc., of New York City, was expressing her thoughts to her assistant, Nicole Gamin. Roberts didn’t wait for an answer but continued, “I met some marketing professor at a party the other night, and he seemed to think he was holding a class about what’s new in selling. He kept babbling something about team selling. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first. Maybe he had some professional ball team he wanted to sell to someone with more dollars than sense. But then I caught the drift that he was talking about a way to make sales presentations.
“Then last night I read an article in one of the trade journals about team selling. To top it off, my daughter informed me that she was forming a team with some of her Girl Scout friends to sell their cookies this year. Is there some kind of message for us in all this?” Roberts asked Gamin.
Gamin smiled and answered innocuously, “Maybe so!” She had a long list of daily agenda items to go over with her boss and really didn’t want to get involved with a discussion about the merits of team selling. “Now let’s go over what must be done today.”
“You’re putting me off because you don’t like me to mess up your plans for the day. Well, it won’t work. I want to know more about team selling, so put it on the agenda somewhere for today,”
Roberts insisted.
“All right, you’re having lunch with your executive committee. Let’s put it on the agenda for that meeting.” Gamin evidently had said the right thing because her boss immediately got down to the business at hand, planning the day. Mondays were always busy. Not only did all departments start each Monday with a short meeting to plan the week, but the head of each department met with the CEO for lunch, during which company wide matters were discussed. Roberts felt strongly that these Monday lunches were important. They allowed her not only to learn what was going on in the company but also to foster communications between her and the other managers in the organization.
Imaginative Staffing, Inc., was a temporary services firm in New York City. Formed in 1990, it had grown to $17 million in revenues. Besides herself and her assistant, Nicole Gamin, the company had a chief financial officer, a sales director, four sales reps, an operations manager, 10 account managers, five administrative assistants, and a receptionist.
One reason Roberts had perceived the team selling messages was that for some time she had been frustrated by the length of time it took to close a sale with a good prospect. On average, it took about six months of hard work to make a sale to a major customer. One of the sales reps would make the contact and do all of the selling, sometimes with the help of the sales director if the situation seemed to warrant it.
Large and small corporations made extensive use of temporary help for one or more of several reasons: (1) to fill in for workers who, for some reason, were unable to work; (2) to handle overload conditions; or (3) to take care of seasonal peak workloads. In the current legal environment, many organizations were reluctant to hire permanent employees until there was a clear-cut, long run need for them. Such factors as benefit packages, insurance, unemployment claims, and termination difficulties made management think seriously about hiring people as employees.
The lunch meeting proceeded smoothly as the group ate and disposed of the agenda items in order. When the last item, team selling, came up, members of the group looked at each other with puzzlement. What was it about? Only Susan Borland, the sales director, knew what team selling was. She was not eager to take the lead in the discussion, preferring instead to sit back to find out what was on Roberts’s mind. She did not have long to wait.
The CEO began, “You may wonder why I have put this item on the agenda, so I’ll not keep you wondering. For some time I have not been satisfied with our selling effort. It seems to take too much time to gain the confidence of prospective accounts to the extent that they feel comfortable with us. We are relatively new in this market. They don’t know us. I’ve heard and read about team selling as a system that might be of use to us. I want to know exactly what it is and if it is something we should be using.”
“It’s interesting that you bring this up today because I just had a breakfast meeting with a sales team for Colony Cablevision,” Susan Borland said. She continued, “As you know, I’m on the board of directors of my homeowners’ association. We have more than 1,000 homes in our planned development, most of whose owners individually subscribe to a cable television system at an average cost of about $45 a month. Now we have been approached by Colony to enter into a bulk billing deal in which all the homeowners will be billed by the association at an attractive price, less than $20 a month for the package. Well, they flew in one of the top managers from their home office to join with the local manager, the local technical engineer, the local marketing manager, and the person who would be our account manager. Each of them made a presentation, and I must say it was effective. I think the board bought it. Anyway, at the time I wondered if this was something we should be doing.”
The receptionist informing several of the managers that their 1:30 appointments were waiting interrupted the meeting. As they stood up to leave, Roberts asked Borland to prepare a plan for developing and training a sales team for the group to consider at some meeting in the near future.
Susan Borland had been with the company from its beginning. In the early days she did whatever needed to be done, but as the firm grew and was able to hire people to do specific jobs, she devoted more and more of her time to sales. At first she was the firm’s only salesperson, but as the company grew she was able to hire more sales reps and she spent increasingly more time in the office, yet she still helped the sales reps whenever they needed it. She was interested in her assignment and intended to get on it that afternoon with the help of her assistant, Judy Morgan.
After briefing Morgan about the team-selling assignment, Borland told her to go to the library and research the subject. “Find out everything you can about it and who is using it.”
That evening, Borland was talking about the day with a friend and the conversation drifted into team selling. The friend, a sales rep for a leading software company, was familiar with the concept since his firm used it to sell to important accounts. He advised, “Don’t put too many people on the team, or things can get confusing to the prospect. On one of our first team sales calls, we had seven people in there pitching. It was a disaster. The prospect was overwhelmed with information, much of which was useless. Our people weren’t trained. We had some of the programming people in there, and you can imagine their selling skills. They just wouldn’t talk about what the prospect wanted to hear; they just talked in their lingo.”
Susan Borland listened. She had already decided who should be on the sales team, but now she realized that some of these people would require training.
Required to do:
Problem 1: Should Imaginative Staffing, Inc., adopt a team-selling system for selling to important accounts?
Problem 2: If so, who should be on the team?
Problem 3: What training would be needed by the team? To what extent should the team’s presentation be planned
Problem 4: Analyze the key elements and processes of selecting and recruiting a sales force for the organization described in the case.
Problem 5: Select an appropriate training modality for both initial and recurrent training for the organization described in the case.
Problem 6: Describe the different methods that can be used to motivate the sales personnel of the organization described in the case.