Jason Looper

Corporate Training – Jason Looper

Jason Eric Looper

job analysis – corporate

Relationship Sales Gaps

Internal needs assessment and performance gap analysis carried out as part of a team of research students on behalf of a global building materials company.

Relationship Sales Gaps

corporate needs assessment

Client

International building materials supplier

Time

3 months (primary analysis)

Post-audit survey conducted 3 months later

Collaborative Role

  • Project Proposal author

  • Co-Researcher

  • Co-Author

  • Co-Designer

  • Co-Survey question designer

  • Creative Direction

design Tools

Photoshop
Illustrator 

The Challenge

What to do when an unwieldy, international building materials group suspects its salespeople’s skill set may be incongruent with recently updated company-wide goals? Ask a team of grad students to start poking around, of course! My 3 colleagues and I cooperated with a global building supplies maker to:

  • assess the job performance of its Sales Representatives
  • offer suggestions for mitigating job/task inefficiencies to achieve key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • ensure stronger and more profitable client relationships.  

What if the reps resent us ‘college kids’ for ‘trying to find fault with’ their jobs?

Will management accept our findings even if they’re unflattering?

Background

This building materials company was in the process of going through a transitional period. It was changing its B2B sales strategy to move away from the classic transactional negotiation style to a relationship-based style. However, management felt that its salespeople were under performing and might have been unprepared or under prepared for their new roles.

Essentially, my team and I were carrying out an audit. Our remit was to not only put the company’s salespeople under examination regarding their job/task fit within the new negotiating (relationship sales) model, we were also encouraged by senior management to put the sales managers and team leaders under scrutiny and ask if they’d handled the transition effectively or not.

Role

I was responsible for a range of duties, including:

  • analyzing the literature regarding ‘transactional’ and ‘relationship’ management
  • developing, designing, collating and analyzing measurement tools (i.e. interview, and survey questions)
  • synthesizing data by designing visual models that included a SWOT analysis 
  • evaluating the data to assist in making detailed recommendations (action steps) that closely aligned with the company’s KPIs
  • designing all visual aids

My primary role at the start was to conduct a rigorous analysis of available literature on exactly what distinguishes Transactional from Relationship Sales management strategies. This research allowed our team to identify what the ‘ideal performance’ of relationship sales should look like.

My design and development of survey and interview questions allowed us to get a clearer picture of how the Sales Reps understood their new job role and responsibilities. I was also responsible for crafting the interview questions that targeted Team Leaders. The combination of these tools gave us a better understanding of whether a gap existed between team leaders’ expectations and the actual performance of sales representatives job/task duties.

After a team member and I designed and developed the survey questions, I handled the implementation by transmitting the survey questions to Sales Reps’ smartphones via Survey Monkey.

Once the completed surveys were collected, I partnered with a team member to collate and further analyze responses.

Results

Upon completing the ‘audit’, our team presented and defended findings on the gaps in the job/task expectations of Sales Reps. We offered evidence that this gap was caused by a lack of training in relationship sales negotiating strategies. Based on our findings, we suggested clear action steps that were aligned with detailed “critical success factors” for implementation.

Follow-up interviews and surveys conducted four months later offered evidence that our research and suggestions were proving effective.