The Sales Force— Working With Reps
This is the fifth in a number of articles serializing The Sales Force— Working With Reps by Charles Cohon, MANA’ s president and CEO. The entire book may be found in the member area of MANA’ s website.
When Harold arrived in the conference room carrying a coffee cake, Jim was relieved. The mood as their last meeting ended had seemed a bit tense, but the pastry told Jim that Harold either hadn’ t noticed or wasn’ t carrying a grudge. Harold set the coffee cake on the conference table, and before he even sat down began slicing it with a plastic knife. Harold dropped into a chair at the head of the table and they exchanged pleasantries for a couple of minutes. Then Harold carefully set on the table a sheaf of hand-written notes so thick that Jim could tell the meeting probably would last all morning. Harold began to speak.“ Jim, when it comes to applying statistics to business problems, most of the books I’ ve read and the experience I’ ve had apply them to operations and manufacturing issues, so the only examples I have readily available to explain this topic are from operations and manufacturing. I promise you we’ ll get to how this fits with our sales
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force compensation problems, but please bear with me even if it looks like I am headed off on a tangent during the first part of this discussion.”
Jim’ s nod gave assent, so Harold continued.“ What I want to talk about today is the difference between results that are a part of a system and results that are an indication of a special case. What I mean by a system is a group whose members cannot be distinguished from each other by their results.” Jim shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and a quizzical look passed over his face. Harold noticed and decided to illustrate his point with a simple example.
“ To explain what I mean by a system, let’ s take a typical example from the shop. Say I have three workers in the shop drilling holes. On Monday, George drills 290 holes, Dominique drills 300 holes