Alfonso L. González Díaz Eureka Forbes Ltd.

: Managing the Selling Effort

Eureka Forbes Ltd (EFL) was set up in 1982 as a joint venture and established in
Bombay. With 20 salespeople at the helm, the company launched its first product, EuroClean, a
vacuum cleaner, and two years later unveiled the AquaGuard purifier. Suresh L. Goklaney
chaired EFL's operation as CEO, and credited its steady profitability rate as it expanded
geographically across India. Simultaneously, EFL's products catered to households able to afford
varying kinds of home appliances. This effort would crown EFL as the market share champion in
vacuum cleaner retailing. Likewise, enrolling females turned out to be a challenging endeavor
for EFL, hence its salesforce was principally composed of youthful males. Moving into the
1990s, ESL launched products such as air purifiers, industrial cleaning products and vacuum
cleaners. air purifiers, industrial cleaning products and safety products. The aim of these products
involved ensuring customers' health and safety. Moreover, EFL sought to assure that customers'
homes mirrored EFL's corporate vision of regarding customers as "a Friend for Life", which in
Chung and Narayandas (2014) terms they might be regarded as 'farmers', rather than 'hunters'.

Then came the 2000s and Goklaney realized that some of the sales reps lacked the buy-in
to perform their responsibilities in demonstrating products to customers, which led him to turn to
EuroChamps, a sort of on-the-job sales managers. As such, the Eurochamp was essentially the
customer sales specialist who, after demonstrating products to customers, aimed to secure a sale.
Eurochamps were no strangers to the challenges of arduous paperwork and procedures, and in
some cases lacked the relevant training. As a result, straightforward sales and customer
commitments were often put on the sidelines. Understandably, this contravened the firm's mantra
of being "a Friend for Life" and risked jeopardizing the firm's course of business. In addition,
following up on sales efforts was also becoming increasingly strenuous.

In the interest of resolving EFL limitations, the Goklaney team may want to advance its
salesforce with changes in a compensation structure scaled to broader regions of impact.
Resistance might be forthcoming, but having a milestone to track for customer and selling
literacy adds a sense of focus to EFL's salesforce. Likewise, metrics should be built with regards
to how they adhere to milestones, beyond those divisions and regions that have been already
tested. Efficacy metrics and feedback pertaining to these EFL customer satisfaction learning
modules and refinements can be integrated into this overall sales force training process.

In the meantime, fine tuning the sales pipeline to deliver future sales as opposed to failing
to achieve a faultless sales technique and not getting the sale should also be pondered by ESL's
top management. Consequently, reward mechanisms for salesforce, even if they don't succeed in
producing a sale, may at best afford a sense of achievement, perhaps in anchoring loyalty or
engagement with customers and the company, which parallelly could enhance salesforce morale.
Such mechanism enhances a formative and gradual learning traction which could foster future
sales trust and motivation.