Sales People Working Virtually
...res can also become more efficient when applying virtual work to sales people. The salesman could just go to his laptop and input all his needs online and then there is someone at the other, usually an administrative person in the organisation, which will do this for him. However, recently we have seen many administrative staff and technicians being overloaded by information and paper work, which instead has caused delays in the ordering process. There are also many advantages for the employer. Introducing virtual work can reduce absenteeism, as the sales people do not have to take time of when children are ill. There is also a reduction of geographic limitations when recruitment sales people and the organisation can make substantial savings for on-site facilities and resources. Current problems and constraints for virtual sales people Even though we have seen more sales people out on the road talking to clients from their mobile then from the phone in the office, virtual sales people still struggle with a range of problems. This is because the technology is both an enabler of virtual work and a limitation of work. Currently, paperwork and other processes are not always fully adapted to electronic handling. Therefore if the sales person is out in the field but unsure if their request from their laptop or PDA have been read and unable to check if the flow is completed, they will still have to return to the office to resolve the resulting information and communication problems. He may also encounter problems out in the field due to current battery life’s on laptops and mobile phones causing delays in file transferring of data. Problems with online sales meetings also frequently occur, as sales people have to spend a lot of dead time in virtual meetings where the technology breaks down. Since virtual sales people often work in disperse locations they are not meeting up with co-workers on a regular basis and can therefore not discuss problems and issues to the same extent. This is related to the problems of team spirit loss. Working on your own as a sales person could be very de-motivating and lonely as you miss the interaction with your peers, which is so important in sales. This can therefore have a negative impact on both your own and the teams performance. Empowering people to work from a remote location also brings up issues of trust and reliability. Since the supervisor cannot control the sales people to the same extent as in the office more responsibility lies on the employees side to hit sales targets and bonuses. Many employers nowadays thus base their financial rewards more on commission then on salary which forces the salesperson to be more active and productive. 3 The question that we then have to ask ourselves is, to what extent do we actually need to have managers in sales oriented organisations? Many managers today still prefer to have some sort of hierarchy, which gives them more power and control over their sales force. As the organisations gets flatter more power is lost, hence the reason why many managers have expressed concerns about virtual working. For an organisation to be successful in its introduction of virtual work there must be a climate of trust and reliability present. This means that the employer has lots of faith in the salespersons capabilities and let him have the privilege of working from his preferred chosen location on the condition that the work gets done. The organisational mechanism For virtual work to be successfully applied to a sales role, the organisation must absorb mobility into their way of doing business and shift from a culture in which technology is merely present to one in which technology is an integral part of key business processes. This fundamental transformation demands new methods and a new mindset. Many corporate sales departments have already replaced their old bureaucratic work structure with a network structure and thereby having virtual work characterises already in place. 4This could clearly be seen when I did my Internship with Bloomberg last year. The sales representatives in the department I worked for communicated asynchronously to exchange expertise and request help. They also spend most of their time with clients in various different financial institutions, not with their colleagues inside Bloomberg. The importance of knowledge sharing among virtual sales people also became very clear to me. Since the sales people store almost all their information on Bloomberg’s intranet, the technology and the process of knowledge sharing becomes extremely important. This is one of the main reasons why I think the sales role has been so compatible with virtual work. Those sales people that do teleworking are also very often used to unbounded work relations. Since they do not work with the other office members, and their client always occurs away from the office, they have no special need to return to the office just to be seen. They can instead turn their attention to creating relationships, free by the confines of the office hours and locations. It is also important to remember that a lot of the sales persons work is not entirely virtual, as they spend time face-to-face with clients but by not being bound to the office makes it so much easier for them. If the sales role is to become truly reliant on virtual work the organisation has to reduce the paperwork and other bureaucratic procedures that do not readily lend themselves to virtual work....