Case Write Up Barbara Wilson Essay

The main challenge of Barbara Wilson as a Regional Sales Manager is to deal with the drop in growth of sales and earnings of the Food Mix Company. She is supposed to provide some ideas to increase the growth of sales. Here for she needs the help of the District Sales Manager and the Sales Representatives, but unfortunately she just got vague answers from them and didn’t receive valuable feedback. That’s why Barbara is not able to keep up or increase sales in her area. One of the main reasons for her problem is the communication between Barbara and her team. The team doesn’t trust her, they don’t see her as one of them, that’s one of the reasons, why they don’t try to help her with providing ideas for the sales growth by sharing their knowledge. Another cause for the problem of Barbara is the structure of the Food Mix Company (FMC). Employees, who have a long work experience (for example 18 or even 36 years) on the same job at FMC don’t get promoted, instead they have managers, like Barbara, who are much younger and well-trained, with few years of work experience and little knowledge about market characteristics and field work. This is frustrating for the employees and doesn’t support a good relation between them and their managers. Another reason for Barbara’s problem lies is the motivational system at FMC. The reward in the form of a bonus is always paid at the end of the year and depends on completing the yearly target, which is defined by the top of the performance from last year. The sales team is not motivated for an outstanding good performance, because this will raise the target for the next year. That’s why, they try to keep the information about the new market segment (older people) as a secret and hide this important strategic information from the top management. They don’t realize the importance of this information for helping to find a solution for decreasing sales. One option for Barbara to handle these problems is the improvement of the communication between her and the team. She should try to build trust by showing interest in the work and problems of the sales representatives and show them, that she is one of them, for example by spending time with the sales representatives on team meetings, workshops or joining them in the field. By spending more time with her team, Barbara would recognize the existing problems and could try to solve them by talking to the top management and find a better way for the motivation system. Another benefit of improving the communication between Barbara and her team is the chance in improving the intelligibility of the team for the strategies and problems of the FMC, so they would understand the importance of sharing their knowledge.