The advantages of management of Salesforce are obvious, the team has a clear vision of the organisation’s, objectives and strategy with the help of CRM software. The introduction of Salesforce CRM system definitely brings down the difficult level of measuring staff performance. Salesforce CRM system allows managers to look at not only monthly sales figure and personal contacts, but also more detailed information, such as what categories of products the person sold most and least, what the converting rate between quotes and sales is, what staff talked to customers, and etc.By analysing these information, managers easily identify the facts why the person is performing or underperforming and how to coach him or her with individual plan. The speed of growing a territory is much faster than before. Therefore, the outsourcing is successful in term of economic growth and sales professionalism.
The disadvantage of management of Salesforce are also noticeable, high staff turnover, price undercutting, more individual than a team and low personal attention.Since Salesforce started managing telephone account manager team, a few Wesfarmers employees have left the company not after long, who all complaint about increasing workload and high stress. Coincidently, some new staff recruited by Salesforce left after 3-6 months, and reasons were quite similar. The survey is produced by SHRM and CareerJournal. com, the free, executive career site of The Wall Street Journal, two of my personal favourite sites (Heathfield,2006).
The bonus is monthly, not quarterly and yearly, and attractive, but hard to get.Staff are more knee on quick sales, instead of building up long-term relationship, that directly causes that staff intend to under price to secure a sale. The sales strategy is leaning more to price driven, not product driven, which leads quite many incidences of selling products under company-preferred margin, and the company does not appreciate that at all. There is also a high bonus for top salesperson in the team.
Team members are quite competitive and aggressive, and like to hold on their ideas and not to share among the team, even if team managers are extremely encouraging.Some team members have acted quite offensive or against this new management or new performance measuring method, who often are being negative to any new ideas or activities put up by team managers to try to lift the performance up. These members usually complaint their personal interests or needs not fulfilled. It seems that all team members are asked to behave as one person, in terms of sales activities and selling style, under the coat of professionalism. Management Structure The entire project was divided into two groups by companies.
Project manager is from Salesforce, one of team leaders is from Wesfarmers, and the other was recruited by Salesforce. Previous Wesfarmers employees exist in both teams. Due to different HR polices and different employment contracts, Salesforce managers can only coach Wesfarmers employees, but are not allowed to discipline them, that also applies to Wesfarmers manager managing Salesforce employees. The firm should ensure employee discipline and possible eventual dismissal for performance-related problems (Macky, 2009).
Employee EngagementTo successfully carry out performance management, the certain level of engagement from employees is required. To gain a greater appreciation and understanding of Employee Engagement, one must also consider. Previous Wesfarmers employees, who are open-minded and willing to accept changes. New employees recruited by Salesforce, who handle well with stress and fast pace. Employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re actively acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged co-workers accomplish.
Some of previous Wesfarmers, who are unhappy about changes, and speak negatively and act against any new policies or ideas. In the case of Wesfarmers, managers did seek to profile and evaluate the types of traits, characteristics, competencies and behaviours amongst engaged employees, but failed to motivate those who aren’t engaged in their jobs. Philip Little(2006) lists some of the main benefits to having engaged employees as leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased revenue.“Not only are engaged employees more productive, but they're also more profitable, safer, less likely to leave their employer, and crucially more customer focused. ” Motivation is incidental to or defined by goal-directed behaviour (Locke ; Ladham, 1990). In reality, given the difficulty in measuring intangible performance contributions to a company, pay for performance is difficult and there is little evidence that pay motivates individuals to higher levels of performance (Moulton, 2005).
Salesforce offers an incentive structure of earning up to $12,000 a year, which is very attractive to a telephone salesperson who only gets $38,000 per year. The Salesforce incentive structure usually assure that a salesperson can get some of $12,000 every year, but almost mission-impossible to earn the top commission. Since the structure is based on growth, so salesperson finds it is getting much harder to earn commission in the second and completely hopeless in the third year. Salesforce employees, who still remain after two years, are very unengaged.
