SUBMITTED BY
NEERAJ KUMAR

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PERFORMANCE EFFICIENCY OF A SALES STAFF
ABSTRACT /SUMMARY
Customer oriented selling, defined as practicing the marketing concept at the level of the individual salesperson and customer is important in selling situations yet has received relatively little attention from marketers. As such, job tenure, gender, organizational commitment, work involvement, and supervisory support are all examined as potential antecedent variables to customer oriented selling. The study, conducted on two different samples of sales personnel, revealed that organizational commitment is significantly related to selling style. However, the significance of the other variables differed among these two groups, suggesting that the antecedents of a customer oriented selling approach may indeed be product/service specific, job specific, or some combination thereof.
A recurring, but unresolved, issue in salesforce research is the choice of salesperson performance evaluation methodology. Salesforce compensation is typically based on some form of evaluation, and hence the assessment method used is critical. The authors outline several evaluation methods currently in use and their pros and cons. Some methods are purely output or purely input based, and often employ only one indicator of performance. Still other methods use absolute ratios of outputs to inputs, or compare performance with the "average" performance rather than the "best." The authors propose a data envelopment analysis (DEA) based approach that provides a measure of relative (to best) performance efficiency. An empirical example illustrates the proposed method of salesperson evaluation. The advantages of the proposed approach are discussed along with a description of situations in which its use may be more appropriate.
OBJECTIVES
Research has shown that people who possess a specific set of behavioral traits tend to excel in the position of sales. These individuals tend to be highly motivated, energetic, extroverted, and possess an innate desire to succeed. The challenge is to identify through the interview process if an applicant possesses the traits you are looking for.
The sales staff should also be professional and articulate so they can sell themselves and your product or service. Sales force may be the only contact customers have with the company. The company will be judged by how the sales force represents themselves, specifically, their attitude and behavior. Hiring the right individuals who fit culture will help to ensure their positive representation of the company when dealing with customers.
An effective sales person is someone who can cultivate long-term relationships with customers, someone who is genuinely friendly, easy to talk to and likable. These are the first traits you can quickly identify during a phone or personal interview. Remember how sales staff interact with the candidate for the first time will be similar to the experience the customers face with the candidate.
REVIEW OF LITRETURE
Sales meetings, the company leader gave an impassioned speech to mobilize efforts to improve the performance of sales staff, sales staff did not direction; increase investment marketing costs, but not significantly drive sales growth; sales plan blindly, customers complain about a time when certain products out of supplies , warehouse there are a large number of other products backlog; behind closed doors, new products unmarketable serious. Possible, business needs to be done on the sales process has improved.
In most cases, the company's sales process was developed by the senior leadership to write, yet most of the senior management of enterprises from the market, do not take the initiative to visit the market or contact with customers, they lack an effective first-line market information to understand. But they feel even larger than the clients understand the customers and feel good about themselves that the sales staff to do was just following orders like. On this basis, develop the sales process, and can not achieve greater marketing efficiency and effectiveness goals.
The formulation of the sales process must have a sales staff participation, and real-time even more. Sales is the market intelligence agents, they provide market information, optimize the sales process can be a first-hand material. At the same time 'there is the significance of salespeople is to persuade customers signing, improve corporate earnings, close to customers and find ways to make the necessary after-sales service. 'Therefore, those who listen to these views of the implementation of the sales process is essential.
Many companies do not have a standardized sales processes, sales personnel, sales process entirely on the individual understanding and personal ability to achieve, but the sales staff have a certain assessment of the performance, for the sales process entirely by the sales staff to conduct in accordance with their understanding.
To do a better company, its sales processes usually contain a series of hit list, the provisions of the sales staff in the sales process the customer a series of moves, while the sales staff are in accordance with the provisions of the sales process to complete the sales process in the task of , and this feedback, such as: visits ** dealer, and confirm the number of shipments will be posted on the dealer store posters, publicity board, and so on.
I had a Japanese enterprise as a consultant, this enterprise was originally to rely on aerial advertising and a reasonable profit double pulling the channels become the leader in daily chemical industry, sales personnel for the role of the market very few. As the market changes, increasing competition, consumers are more rational, enterprises have to consider increasing the sales management costs: changes in sales policies to increase the sales staff to provide sales personnel actions and to allow assessment mechanism. However, this cannot completely solve the problem - their sales process is also concerned about the lack of customer activity and feedback.
The sales process to customers the opportunity as a starting point, the customer's customers the opportunity to again work with our customers the opportunity to be a chain reaction. If the customer's customer satisfaction, then your customers will be satisfied.
Process the lack of attention to customers and consumers, we can not fully understand the actual needs of consumers and customers can not objectively evaluate what kind of dealer-to-business policy, what kind of response would be, in the formation of client opportunities for a certain obstacles.
Customer value-oriented and effective sales process, should also concerned about the reaction of markets and customers and needs. Such as: the dealer of the product improvement and support needs of dealers for their customers how to carry out sales and maintenance, the customer how to provide customer value to their customers, the actual concern of whether the consumer is our target population, we aim to consumer in the buying process in the performance of what is so ... ....
Sometimes, not only the sales process will focus on the activities of customers into sales process, sometimes the sales process improvements also need to listen to customers.
Inventory can not meet customer order demand, orders can not clearly understand the person in charge recently finished production plans, would be unable to accurately to the client a 'when they can order' response. When a customer loyalty high, franchised, or no financial pressure, or tasks to complete the sale perhaps this is not a problem. Once the conditions are changed, the customer is likely to achieve efficiency in the use of funds forced to choose other company / brand products.
Sales information management an important aspect is the distribution of segments within an enterprise's daily production of sales data recorded in a timely manner. On this basis, in different latitudes (such as the distribution system, time, brand, product type, etc.) parameters of the sales query, statistics and analysis, so as to achieve different levels of decision-makers can make timely access to appropriate levels of sales data for the enterprise in sales, production and procurement decision-making more scientific basis. Also, companies can make use of powerful information management system to improve information management, efficiency and effectiveness.
In the meantime, the establishment of organic marketing organization, thereby facilitating the research, production, selling price the value chain collaboration is effective basis for improving the marketing process and guarantees.
METHODOLOGY
Research design. The quantitative research approach was utilized to achieve the exploratory and the descriptive objectives of the study which highlighted the employees beliefs and perceptions with regards to employee motivation.The quantitative research approach is most appropriate when conducting descriptive and exploratory study in order to quantify data that seem immeasurable, such as feelings, beliefs, and thoughts. This permits a flexible and iterative approach of analyzing and statistically manipulating the collected information.
Research method. The survey method was used to be able to come up with descriptions of the variables that are of interest and related to the topic of the study. The descriptions of each variable lead to the investigation of their possible relationship with each other as well as how each of them may influence the outcome of the other concepts of the study. The data to be utilized in the research will be both primary data (also known as the first-hand data) and secondary data. While the primary data are collected straight from the sources and are gathered through the survey which will be the key research tool, the secondary data are collected from current related literatures. The secondary analysis method involves the use of existing data, collected for the purposes of a prior study, in order to pursue a research interest which is distinct from that of the original work.Secondary data analysis is composed of the reviews of references and sources in this study to either support or rebut the claims and findings of this particular research endeavour. This enables the researcher to compare and contrast the results that were accumulated by other researchers who investigated the issue on legalizing euthanasia and other forms of assisted deaths.
Sampling technique. Stratified sampling technique operates by selecting samples in such a way that specific sub-groups or strata will have a sufficient number of representatives within the sample to provide sample numbers for the sub-analysis of the members of these subgroups. The concept of non-random convenience sampling was likewise used to govern the selection procedures of the respondents who participated since those who were asked to fill out the questionnaires were the employees who at the time of the data collection were available to fill out the survey questionnaire.
For this research study, the total number of samples that was required is least 100 people. But since there is a possibility that several of the accomplished questionnaires do not pass the standards of validity set by the researcher, 25 other individuals who have the same characteristics as that of the defined target samples of the study were also asked to accomplish the questionnaire as reserved samples. Such incidents include half-finished survey form, inconsistent answers, untruthful information and forms of the respondent who did not answer the questionnaire seriously. These 25 additional respondents were composed of the 5 employees. Upon the completion of the required number of respondents for the survey method, the valid questionnaires were still included in the presentation and analysis of the findings and results of the study.
Research instrument. The survey questionnaire was used as the primary tool in the data collection period for the convenience of both the researcher and the respondents of the study which distributed to 25 employees. The questions included in the questionnaire are composed mostly of close-ended queries for easy manipulation of the data during analysis and interpretation. The survey form is composed of queries that the respondents assessed using the Likert scale. The survey form has 6 main parts which include the basic demographic characteristics of the respondents followed by the 5 key areas that were focused on by the research study. The Likert scale format was used to measure the level of agreeability of statements that were categorized according to the concepts of communication, leadership, team work, training and development, and compensation and benefits of the survey participants.
ANALYSIS AND PRESENTATION
For the quantitative data analysis of the variables of the study, descriptive statistics were primarily used so as to present descriptions in manageable forms. As such, univariate analysis which involves the evaluation of different cases of a specific variable for a specific period of time was incorporated through statistical tools in the form of the frequency distribution. The measures of central tendency: (a) mean, (b) median, and © mode is an estimate of the "center" of a distribution of values. It is the distribution or summary of the number of occurrence of individual values or ranges of values for a variable (Price, 2000). Frequency values and percentages of the answers of the respondents compose some of the findings and results of the study. The percentage formula was used to determine the magnitude of the responses to the questionnaire
n
% = -------- x 100 ; n = number of responses
N N = total number of respondents

The statistical analysis is conducted using Microsoft Excel where the quantitative data are tabulated, graphed and evaluated. The data and information gathered in using the secondary data analysis were used to support and rebut the claims of the study wherein critical examination and analysis of the findings were compared and contrasted with each other.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Recent research demonstrates that attitudes toward the workplace are influenced by both work and non-work domains. This study examines the inter-relationships of role conflict, role ambiguity, work-family conflict, emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction and propensity to leave in a sales environment. Results indicate that: role conflict is significantly related to emotional exhaustion; work-family conflict is significantly related to both emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction; and, that emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction are related to salesperson propensity to leave. These results support other research indicating the conflict between the work and home domains is highly related to important workplace attitudes and perceptions and suggests that work-family conflict should be included in models examining employee response to the effects of stress.