Case study 9
Cost effective deployment of sales resource across market sectors
At the Royal Mail, from a direct sales channel perspective, there are different tiers of account management depending on the size, strategic importance or potential size of a particular customer.
This ranges from a corporate client director (often supported by a team of sales and support staff) through to a telephone based account manager for smaller accounts.
Royal Mail has developed a ?sales algorithm? to help plan the most cost effective deployment of different types of sales resource across market sectors.
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This attempts to model the historical and projected impact of different degrees of sales specialism on different industry sectors to produce a view of the long term value of sales.
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This eliminates the impact of other growth factors (such as the performance of the economy or the impact of television advertising) and includes a carry over factor to reflect the fact that the impact of sales / account management activity continues, albeit at a diminishing rate for a period after that activity has ceased.
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The algorithm allows the organisation to determine whether to increase or reduce sales investment in particular areas, either by increasing / reducing the number of sales people devoted to a sector or by shifting the type of sales cover provided.
Using sales tracking and the Siebel system it is then possible to track the effectiveness of these decisions and change the assumptions underpinning the sales model over time.
Allowance also has to be made for the impact of other forms of marketing activity on the performance of accounts, the impact of direct mail or television advertising campaigns, for example. At present these are modelled separately and used as an overlay to the model.