dolution

Develop a set of open and close-ended questions to fully discoverBancVue’s needs (at least 6 questions). Personal Selling-Marketing

BancVue / Buyer Role Play Information

You are the vice-president of sales, with four regional sales managers and 26 salespeople. Each sales manager has about 6 or 7 salespeople and one sales assistant. The company was growing at 20% per year up until about a year ago but that has slowed considerably and you are currently projecting no growth.

You are interested in finding a customer relationship management (CRM) software solution that would integrate sales and marketing more efficiently. You think that the company could support salespeople more efficiently if the company had better access to the salespeople’s records. There is no budget for any software, so if you like what you see, you’ll have to meet with both the CEO and CFO to see if they’ll allocate any funds for it.

BancVue has had a history of hiring salespeople from other companies and providing no sales training, assuming that they learned how to sell before they joined. For that reason, you have no idea what their skills are. One reason you want a CRM solution is you want to track performance by stage of the selling cycle because you think this will give your managers an opportunity to grow sales by improving salesperson performance. You can’t grow sales by hiring more salespeople because the flat sales projections are causing the CEO and CFO to think about cutting costs, not adding them. In fact, they have asked you to consider terminating 2 to 3 salespeople per region unless sales improve.

You also think, but don’t really know, that one problem is with the marketing process. For example, you have trade shows that generate some leads, but you aren’t certain that these are followed up on by salespeople promptly. A CRM solution would get the leads to the field much more quickly than happens now, plus you could see if and when the rep made a sales call to follow up.

Right now, sales reps turn in weekly call reports to report what they’ve done, and plans for the coming week. How they keep track of their current accounts is a matter of preference, but most just use Microsoft Outlook and sync to a PDA of their own choosing. Reporting is done by email. Some managers have created Excel spreadsheets to track their salespeople’s account activity, and they ask their reps to turn in reports in Excel but there is no company standard.

Reps tend to build friendly relations with their accounts. Each rep manages only about ten to twenty accounts, each billing $100,000 to $500,000 per year. The reps claim that customer care takes all their time and they don’t have time to grow new accounts. You are worried about what happens to accounts if salespeople are terminated. You know that when a rep quits, those accounts usually don’t stay with the company.