Water Chromatography Case Analysis

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Sales execs can pull two levers to increase sales 1 they increase the quantity of sales efforts by adding sales people or 2 they improve the quality of sales efforts by investing in training. The third option is improve allocation of sales efforts where sales personnel work smarter not harder. This requires a more appropriate division of time between customer, products, and sales activities. This third option can often times result in larger impact than the first two. (Zoltners, Andris, Sinha PK, Lorimer, Sally, Help Your Salespeople Spend Time on the Right Things, HBR, Feb 15, 2016)

In the case of Waters in order to decrease the burden of work on the sales force it would require a separation of sales and services to provide the sales force with the opportunity to pursue new business development opportunities. Hire more service technicians and sale people into support functions. This will enable it in increasing the customer satisfaction, reach and sales numbers. The division and increase in number of employees of each group should be backed by a comprehensive in-house training that will enable them to perform the job with desired standard and quality. When recruiting sales personnel a priority should be given to a technical background and knowledge of product, as this type of sale tends to be high involvement purchase. Training of sales techniques therefore should be provided through onboarding. When salespeople spend time inappropriately due to diverse responsibilities a new sales force structure can help the workforce refocus on company priorities.

Reorganizing the sale force and service, as separate functions along with division of sales team in to teams that handle technical customers and non-technical customers will help in resolving the sale force issues. Waters Chromatography should reorganize to separate sales and service operations along with further division of sale people that cater to technical and non-technical customers so that sales team can pursue new business development.

To avoid sales people closing a deal themselves due to the slow turnaround time of supports department and recognizing the crucial role of support team in taking care of the promised service guarantee, the incentive package of the support staff can be restructured with a variable component based on the number of services executed by them.