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Selling in practice

Case study JohnsonDiversey

JohnsonDiversey (www.johnsondiversey.com) is an international company of cleaning
products. Its parent company is S C Johnson whose headquarters are in the USA. Originally
a British company JohnsonDiversey was sold to an American conglomerate in 1985 who in
turn sold it to Unilever in 1996 before it was acquired by S C Johnson in 2001.
The company have a sales force in excess of 300 calling on all sorts of private and public
organisations. The sales organisation use ‘FrontDesk’, a sales reporting tool developed
internally using software based on Lotus notes. The aim is to hold full details on all cus-
tomers at the head office. Specially filtered information is held by individual salespeople on
laptops and up-dated by them on a daily basis. The system is intended to allow the company
to more accurately tailor its products and services to the needs of the customer. The system
is also used to monitor and measure sales force efficiency. FrontDesk has been designed to
work with SAP which is used to optimise the company’s financial performance and the two
systems interface three times a day to provide as near as possible real time measurement of
sales and customer activities.
The success of FrontDesk relies on the salesperson updating customer information in full
every day but less than 30 per cent of the sales force actually does so. This is despite full
training and one-to-one training sessions with every member of the sales team. Changes have
been made to work patterns and activities to ensure time and resources are available.
Although some downsizing of the sales force has resulted in recent redundancies, changes
were made to the pay structure with field salespeople receiving pay increases on the under-
standing that FrontDesk was rolled out and utilised. To date, no improvement in the usage
of FrontDesk has materialised.

Questions
1 Why do you think there has been reluctance to use the FrontDesk system?
2 What else can the company/management do to increase usage of the system?
3 IT failures in Western Europe have been estimated at $40 billion (Dalcher and Genus,
2003). What proposals would you make to assess the financial worth of the system?

Key terms
■ account management ■ enterprise selling
■ consultative selling ■ multi-channel routes to market
■ consumer protection ■ trade descriptions
■ contracts and tenders ■ transaction selling
■ data protection

References
Dalcher, D. and Genus, A. (2003) ‘Avoiding IS/IT implementation failure’ Technological
Analysis and Strategic Management 15 (4): 403–7
DeVincentis, J.R. and Rackham, N. (1998) ‘Breadth of a salesman’ The McKinsey Quarterly
4: 33–43
Donaldson, B. and O’Toole, T. (2002) Strategic Market Relationships: from strategy to
implementation John Wiley and Sons: Chichester

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