• Blended jobs. These are jobs where the salesperson is doing two or more dissimilar selling tasks. Sales specialization improves performance.
• Corrupted jobs. Decontaminate jobs that are degraded with non-selling tasks such as “fetch and get” after-the-sale customer service duties.
• Account ownership confusion. While necessary, the effective use of global account managers, national account managers and overlay specialists requires explicit account ownership protocols.
The ownership confusion bullet catches my eye in that we have a customer that is working through this problem. They have a major account manager who has a tendency to swoop into territories covered by local sales reps. The major account manager often comes into town without informing the local salesperson of his visit.
In the worst-case scenario that actually happened, the local sales rep called on a prospect who became confused. The prospect wanted to know why the local guy wanted to meet him when the major accounts manager just met with him 3 days earlier.
Oy vey!