Case Study:
Sales Force Reorganization
Situation
A leading maker of blood monitoring systems had a long track record of double digit growth and significant market share. Recently, the overall sector growth rate had decreased and the client was experiencing difficulty in meeting revenue and market share targets. The overall return on sales force investments dropped significantly.
Client Need
The client's strategic goals were to rebuild its significant share in blood monitoring systems and create a sales organization capable of maximizing returns on investment for resources deployed. This required understanding the changed market needs, integrating a new sales strategy based on those needs, and restructuring the sales organization to be more flexible and regionally focused.
Putnam's Role
Specifically, the client asked Putnam Associates to:- Assess the market change impact on sales force needs and conduct a region-by-region market overview, managed care analysis, and trade sales analysis.
- Analyze the adequacy of current sales force structure and deployment
- Develop a sales strategy to increase market share over the next five years
- Recommend staffing and organizational changes needed to execute the new strategy, for one, three and five year terms.
Recommendations
Through extensive analysis, Putnam determined that the market was saturated and that it was crucial to retain customer base and take market share from competitors. Putnam's research also revealed increasing purchase influence from industry recommendations, trade channels, and managed care.Putnam developed a set of key sales strategy imperatives to maintain market share. These recommendations identified new priorities for high value customers, industry pundits, regional capability, strategic account planning, and organizational credibility.
Putnam then detailed a strategy refocus within the client's organization to build sales capability, modify reporting relationships, and increase headcount.
To make the strategic plans actionable, Putnam presented an implementation plan highlighting the activities that were critical to success. These steps ranged from human resource force hiring and promotion, field sales redeployment, customer retention processes, competitor contingencies, strategic account planning, partnerships and alliances, and information systems support.
