Salesforce Management Auditing: A First Draft

Literature Review

Lendrevie et al. (1996) define a sales team as a group of people who sell products and services through direct contact with potential customers, distributors, or prescribers. Salespeople are sometimes the linking between companies and their customers, a reason that gives them significant prominence for the success of companies (Johnston & Marshall, 2016), and they are a critical and expensive marketing resource (Zoltners et al., 2008). Hence, a lot of attention must be paid to how the salespeople's management is performed. Given the high investments required by salespeople’s activities, a monitoring procedure should be implemented to evaluate their efficiency and such monitoring procedure should be performed frequently and with some proximity (Wilson, 2002).

As previously mentioned, the first and most important study was carried out by Dubinsky and Hansen (1981), in which the authors present the definition: a sales audit is a diagnostic instrument, comprehensive and of systematic use, aimed to assess the suitability of the sales management process and recommend the required adjustments to enhance performance. The authors further stated that sales audits should be performed periodically and by all companies. Hutchison (2006) supports the ideas described above, stating that the main purpose of a sales audit is to find and describe the sales management process, identify impediments that interfere with the appropriate execution of the sales process, analyze and measure its efficiency, and continuously reevaluate it to diagnose probable enhancements.

Wilson (2002) and Dubinsky and Hansen (1981) claim that auditing the management of the sales team should concentrate on the themes recruitment and selection, education and training, territorial and training, territory allocation, compensation, motivation, leadership, performance, and a few others. Nevertheless, one remark must be made regarding the previous sentence. The main themes of the sales team management audit proposed by Dubinsky and Hansen (1981) are environment, planning system, organization assessment, and functions. All the previous themes are related to the management of the sales team and these topics partially encompass the ones mentioned by Wilson (2002) but are more comprehensive. The analysis of the main books on sales team management supports the statements of the previous authors, taking away that the themes that stand out the most are recruitment and selection, training, motivation, leadership, compensation, performance, and territory design. The following books were consulted for analysis purposes: Johnston and Marshall (2021), Ingram et al. (2020), Jobber et al. (2019), Zoltners et al. (2009), Spiro et al. (2008), Zoltners et al. (2006), Zoltners et al. (2004), Noonan (1998), and Churchill, Ford and Walker (1985). The themes identified are like those described in the publications on auditing sales team management and can be classified into seven categories: 1) recruitment and selection; 2) training; 3) motivation; 4) leadership; 5) compensation; 6) performance; 7) territories. Given the results obtained, the following formulation is proposed as a first research proposition.

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  RP 1: A sales team management audit should be focused on recruitment and selection, training, motivation, leadership, compensation, performance, and territories.

After the identification of the major themes underlying sales team management through literature review in the reference books listed above and in peer-reviewed academic articles, a more detailed study of each theme is presented in the following sections.