Ankur Rana

FT161018

Milford Industries
(A)

By: Ankur Rana

FT161018
Section A

Ankur Rana

FT161018

Table of contents
1. Introduction..3
2 Problems...3
3 Possible Solution..3

Ankur Rana

FT161018

Introduction
The case starts off with the promotion of Harry Oates to the position of sales manager after
the sudden demise of Samuel Goldberg who earlier held the position. Harry Oates was made
in-charge of the Capital District region. The region which contributed to a major share of the
total sales of the company, and hence was strategically of prime importance. However the
sales figures were not up to the mark and there was a lot of scope for improvement. It fell
upon Harry to identify and eliminate the problems causing sub-par sales and improve the
performance.

Problems
The poor performance by the sales team can be attributed to the following factors:

Inefficient management: Without good leadership the team was bound to not do
well. And the previous manager did not do a very good job at managing the team.
Samuel was unable to uplift the moral of his employees to work hard towards
achieving the targets. A low moral lead to employees dissatisfaction and resulted in
high employee turnover. The turnover ratio for Capital district was much higher than
the company average indicating employee dissatisfaction. Another major flaw in
Samuels management style was his lack of control over his employees.
Inefficiency of sales force: The effect of poor management trickled down to the
performance of the sales force. Inefficiency by the sales force lead to poor
performance in the district. (4.7% share of national sales opposed to 5.8% expected).
Further the year on year growth in sales figures were also much lower than the
national average. Despite the fact that it was a district with high potential. Individual
performance by the sales persons was also very low. This is evident in the low
average sales figures by the individuals as compared to the national average. (only
62% of the national average)
Identification of problem individuals: Dough Eaton was identified as an
underperformer. His lack of performance was due to his old age and deteriorating
health conditions. Tom Furness had issues balancing his work and personal life. This
had led to a decrease in his performance.

Possible Solution
The following are a list of solutions that Harry could adopt to deal with the problem at hand.

As identified above one of the primary problems was the low morale of the
employees. This in turn resulted in higher turnover. A good way to improve the
morale was to incentivise the performance. One way of doing so was to revise the
compensation scheme. Harry must introduce a large variable pay into the
compensation packages. This variable allowance must be linked to the individual
performance in the previous month/quarter. It is also essential for Oates to create a
personal connect with his team. This way he will be able to understand and address
their problems better.
Another major aspect of improving the performance by the employees was to improve
their skills as a sales force. This can be achieved via the introduction of a training

Ankur Rana

FT161018

program. This would ensure that the sales force are well equipped to face current and
potential clients.
It is also essential that Oates devises a way to accurately measure the performance of
all the people. This way he will be able to identify the star performers and the weak
performers. He can focus on measuring three main criteria while judging
performance:
Performance
Efficiency
Business Development
In order to judge a salesperson he could use metrics like, year on year growth in sale,
Sales per active accounts, Active accounts/potential account, and sales/unit area of
territory assigned. These measure the employee on the above stated criteria. Further
based on the importance of each of these criteria we may assign suitable weights to
each of them. A cumulative score of these weights and metrics would also allow us to
rank the salesperson based on their performance.