Company – IFB Appliances

Context – B2C

Industry – Consumer Durables

Sales force recruitment –

The process of finding and hiring the best qualified candidate (from within or outside of an
organization) for a job opening, in a timely and cost effective manner. The recruitment process
includes analyzing the requirements of a job, attracting employees to that job, screening and
selecting applicants, hiring, and integrating the new employee to the organization.
Different types of sales positions call for performing different activities. To ensure that new recruiters
have the aptitude necessary to be successful in a particular type of sales job , it is best to follow
systematic procedure.

Sales force recruitment process -

At IFB Appliances they have been using following sources to recruit sales force. These sources are listed
below.

1) Recommendations by own salespeople

2) Educational Institute
3) Placement Consultants
4) Personal Acquaintances
 5) Unsolicited applications
6) Competitor’s salespeople
7) Sales personnel of noncompeting firm
Below is the source analysis of Sales personnel recruited by IFB appliances in India.

Source No. of Recruits % of Total

Recommendations by own 96 13.85
salespeople
Educational Institute 103 14.86
Placement Consultants 114 16.45
Personal Acquaintances 27 3.90
Unsolicited applications 175 25.25
Competitor’s salespeople 100 14.43
Sales personnel of 78 11.26
noncompeting firm
Total 693 100

From above table we can see that IFB has maximum unsolicited applications for recruitment purpose
which is 25.25%. At the same time they focus more on internal recommendations which is combined to
17% as the recruits are more trustworthy and stay long because they are well aware about the organization
culture.

14.43% is the share of competitor’s salespeople. As IFB is in Consumer Durables industry, they have
competitors like Onida, LG, Samsung, Bosch, Voltas, Bluestar, etc. So IFB poach their competitor’s
salespeople because they already have vast knowledge of that particular industry and they know the
market very well.

We feel that IFB should hire more from competitor’s salespeople and Personal Acquaintances because of
market knowledge and trust respectively. Hires from Educational Institute should also be increased as
they are fresh talent and can think more creatively towards sales.

Selection Process of Salespeople at IFB Appliances -

Selection process at IFB consists of 3 rounds of interviews.

1) Aptitude test
2) Functional interview
3) HR interview

In aptitude test, there are set of questions consist of quant, verbal and Data Interpretation. This test is
conducted to know the analytical and problem solving skills which are very essential for a sales person in
day to day operations. Next is face to face interview with Business Head / Business manager wherein
functional and sales related situational questions are asked. It is to test the expertise of a candidate
regarding his/her past experience or if a fresher than how well he/she knows the concept and its
utilization. Last is HR round they look for cultural fit, location flexibility and compensation.

We think they have adequate number of rounds and they cover almost all the aspects to test whatever is
needed by a sales person and test that person accordingly for cultural as well as technical fit for the job.

Our suggestion to them would be to take a psychometric test as a part of pre preparation of further round
because it gives data in terms of cultural and mindset fitment. Besides this stress interview must be taken
so that there are more robust workforce can be there.

Training at IFB appliances –

The objectives of training and development are as follows:

 To develop entrepreneurship and expertise par excellence through training and retraining
 To prepare executives to meet the strategic business goals in the fast changing environment.
 To create a learning environment in order to achieve a competitive edge through leveraging
human resource
 To develop training tools and techniques to facilitate effective learning.
 To organize interactive workshops in upstream industry area.
 To strive for continuous improvement in all aspects of E&P activities through training in the
emerging technologies.
 To inculcate quality consciousness
 To promote IT as an instrument of organizational transformation
 To cultivate creative and innovative thinking
 Reducing gap between current and expected level of performance through systematic enrichment
of knowledge, skills and attitudes.
 Developing multi-craft skills.
 Preparing executives for career advancement
 To impart training to all employees to motivate then towards actualization of potential.

Induction Training
The fresh incumbents of the organization are exposed to wide gamut of technology of consumer goods
industry synergic approach covering multi – disciplinary theoretical and practical aspects with emphasis
upon on the job training.

Thus, a newly recruited executive undergoes an intensive classroom training interspersed with field
exposure to effectively specialize him in the organization.

So IFB is very much a believer of providing training to its staffs whether they are new or existing one.
They have trainers at every state which takes care of sales people regarding training and development.
There are training of CSRs every 2 months and every 3 – 5 months sales executive undergoes training
regarding new products and personality development which helps organization as well as an employee as
a whole.

We conclude that training at IFB appliances is very robust where in every technical and functional aspect
of a product is covered. They have proper modules prepared for training. They just need to continue with
the same.

Equipping -

IFB has very old style manual sales method wherein every employee has to do the work manually be it
report generation or daily activity updating, managing leads and leveraging its benefits. So we would
suggest IFB appliances to adopt latest technologies and tools for sales people so that there are less
administrative and paper work and more and more productive time available to them. Below are the steps
can be taken by IFB.

1) Introducing and optimizing your CRM for your sales process is crucial. Load it with all the
material your customers need to make a decision, and encourage your reps to use it religiously.
2) Badger Maps is an outside sales app that uses your CRM data to give your reps a visual overview
of their territory. They can create and optimize multi-stop routes, find leads, track activity and
even filter customer lists by category – all in the app.
3) Field activity is the final piece of the puzzle for the average outside sales team. Once you
optimize your sales team’s time by enabling their process you’ll notice more deals close at a
faster rate. It’s unavoidable.

Assigning and Supervising –

Work assignment at IFB is very random and every sales person does so many works at a time. A sales
person at IFB is responsible for sale of product, marketing activity and its arrangement; sometimes
administrative work is also included. So it would make difficult and unjustifiable to a sales person on his
evaluation of work throughout the year and then it will affect increments. So a sales person’s KRA must
be well defined at IFB.

Supervision is necessary because of the following reasons –

Supervision primarily entails giving direction to each person’s work and in relation to the work of others.
It should ensure that people do what they should do and do not do useless things or activities which harm
overall Company objectives. Good supervision will also: (a) provide guidance to improve the abilities and
activities of Sales Representatives in their work and (b) encourage and help them so that they can more
easily help themselves.
Supervision in the sales field (as in all other managing activities) has the following three activities –
planning, directing and checking. In particular, Supervisors should:
(a) Assign a definite amount of work for Representatives to do.
(b) Set required standards of performance.
(c) Evaluate each Representatives performance against the standards.
Supervisors should also divide the available market area into appropriate territories, assign these
territories to particular Representatives, and ensure the Representatives set targets for sales in each of
their territories. Four different groupings exist for standards:
(a) Volume – How much does the Sales Representative sell?
(b) Expenses – How much money does it cost to make the sales?
(c) Profit – What gross profit does each Sales Representative make?
(d) Activities – What does the Sales Representative actually do? (Examples. How many Prospects seen?
How many calls made?)

IFB follows below method to supervise and evaluate sale people.

(a) Personal contact with individual Sales Representatives

(b) Personal contact with a group of Sales Representatives Meetings, conventions, and conferences.
(c) Supervision in the Office

Motivation and Compensation –

Motivation is based on understanding of salespersons as individuals, their personalities and value

systems. Managers should provide the enabling conditions in which salespersons motivate themselves.

Tasks of sales managers in motivating salespeople

 Get to know what each salesperson values and what each one is striving for.
 Be willing to increase responsibility of salespersons.
 Realize that training can improve motivation as well as capabilities by strengthening link
between effort and performance.
 Provide targets that are believed to be attainable yet provide a challenge to salespersons.
 Link rewards to performance that the salesperson wants to improve.
 Recognize that rewards can be financial and non-financial, and both can motivate.
 Convince salespersons that they will sell more by working harder or by being trained to work
smarter i.e. more efficient call planning, developing selling skills.
 Convince salespeople that rewards for better performance are worth the extra effort. Managers
should give rewards that are valued and attempt to sell the worth of those rewards to
salespeople.

Types of salespersons

 Some salespeople have decided the type of life they want. They try to maintain their standard
of living by earning a predetermined amount of money.
 Some of them are satisfiers. They perform at a level just sufficient to keep their jobs.
  Some salespersons make trade-offs. They allocate their time based upon personally
determined ratio between work and leisure that is not influenced by the prospect of higher
earnings.
 Some of them are goal oriented. They prefer recognition as achievers by peers and superiors,
and tend to be sales quota oriented, with money mainly serving as recognition of achievement.
 Some of them are strictly money oriented. Their aim is to maximize their earning. family
relationships, and leisure may be sacrificed in pursuit of money.

Managers must categorize their salespeople before deciding their motivational and compensation plan.
The first three will not be motivated by commission opportunities but the last two will be.

Three types of compensations plans

Fixed salary: Because payment is not linked to sales, salespeople ore willing to carry out such tasks as
technical bock-up, completing information feedback reports and prospecting. It provides security but
opportunity to increase income by increasing sales is lost. There may be perceived injustice if higher
performance salespeople are not paid more than low achieving ones.

Commission only: This provides a strong incentive to sell, too strong at times leading to overbearing
salespeople desperate to close the sales. There is unwillingness to take time off form direct selling tasks to
attend training courses or fill in reports and there is high turnover.

Salary plus commission: A hybrid system provides some incentive to sell with an element of security.
Salary makes about 70 % of the income. This is the most commonly used method of payment. Bonuses
are usually paid on achievement of some task such as achieving a sales target or opening a certain number
of new accounts.

So IFB follows salary plus commission based structure which we think is proper and it is quite
motivating for sales person. The system is attractive to ambitious salespeople who wish to combine a base
level of income with the opportunity to earn more by greater effort and ability.