A recent decision by the British based medical device manufacturer Smith & Nephew to go
rep-less for its no frills solution Syncera raised quite some eye-brows from sales pundits with
one analyst going so far as to term the phrase “Death of the Device Salesman” (Eisner 2014).
While the jury is still out about the long term effectiveness of this sales approach, the medical
industry today has been forced to reconsider the way it deploys its sales resources. To put
things in perspective, a recent article suggests that top pharma companies spend close to 875
million USD each, on their sales force, despite reports from consulting companies like ZS
associates in the US that only 51% of the doctors in their sample prefer a face to face (F2F)
visit from a sales rep and similar numbers being reported in an European sample of 375
specialist doctors (Schenck, 2015). Interestingly enough, across some big European
countries, specialist doctors increasingly preferred to engage with pharmaceutical companies
through a multichannel marketing and sales approach (Schenck 2015). This has led quite
some pharmaceutical companies to reconsider the traditional F2F selling model and an
increased focus on a multichannel marketing and sales approach towards the customer.
Interestingly enough this situation is not restricted to the medical industry. A review of the
financial statements of three major tech companies, IBM, Microsoft, and Apple indicates that
these companies spend on an average 50% more on marketing and sales than on their R&D
budgets (Dainty 2014), while a company like GE spent around 30 billion USD on SG&A in
2014 on revenues of around 150 billion USD (Maketwatch 2015). While these numbers do
not indicate problems as such, a recent study by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB)
suggests that not only do B2B buyers complete 57% of their buying decision before seeing
the sales rep, close to 77% of the buyers indicated that they would talk to the salesperson only
after they had done their own research (Zelaya 2014). If buyers are increasingly trying to
bypass the salesperson and if the users (as in the case of doctors above) prefer other ways to
interact with their supplier organizations besides F2F meetings with salespeople, sales
organizations today have no other choice but to rethink their complete sales approach towards
their customer base. Not taking into consideration the above changes could result in sales
organizations seeing their revenues and margins decrease, alienation of their customer base
thus giving an opportunity for a more agile competitor (or a complete newcomer) to sneak in,
decreased customer satisfaction consequently leading to a decrease in market share.
In order to understand the various challenges faced by sales managers, I set out to understand
the main challenges facing them and how they cope with these issues. Based on extensive indepth
interviews with over 40 sales directors/managers from both local and multi-national
organizations, active in both the B2B and B2C spheres, I identified 5 main trends that sales
managers are busy with today. While these five trends by themselves seemed obvious and
almost ubiquitous, most sales executives were not sure about the impact each one of these
five trends were likely to have on their sales management practices and how to actually
going about dealing with this to ensure the effectiveness of their sales efforts.
Demanding customers, stiff competition, focus of companies on short term gains
has meant that the sales manager today is under tremendous pressure to cope with these
problems or run the risk of seeing declining revenues, decreasing margins, dissatisfied
customers and loss in market shares for their companies. Based on interviews with 40 salesexecutives, we identify five key problems facing the sales manager and how they managethese problems.
