biz

Trials & Tribulations at Sigmund & Shubert

 

After working for 3 years as a sales executive at Sigmund & Shubert Pte Ltd, a large office equipment and furniture supplier, Justin Bleeber, 26, was recently promoted to junior sales manager, the first supervisory position he has ever held in his still young working life.

 

Although he was initially very happy about reaching the first milestone of what he hoped to be a successful management career, Justin is now becoming much more aware of the difficulties and pitfalls of supervising the work and managing the individual peculiarities of five sales executives on the one hand while, on the other, trying to maintain a good working relationship with a particularly difficult supervisor, Martina Blinggis, a senior sales manager and a 10-year veteran at Sigmund & Shubert (S&S). And so, in the last 7 months following his promotion, Justin has had some successes but also his share of trials and tribulations.

 

It all started when, one week after becoming junior sales manager, Justin chaired his first meeting with his sales team where he presented the main goals that they had to achieve during the next year, goals that he was given the responsibility to set and formulate after consulting with Martina.

 

Summing up his 20-minute presentation to the sales team, Justin said in his last slide:

“We basically have three key goals to achieve in the next financial year 2016:

 

Goal 1 Our team must increase its sales revenues by 20% above this year’s target of US$ 5 million.

 

Goal 2 Our team must improve our after-sale customer service because we receive too many complaints that we abandon our customers after they have signed their purchase orders.

 

Goal 3 Our team must push our most profitable products more aggressively.”

 

Immediately after the presentation, all five sales executives started flooding Justin with questions, asking him to clarify what exactly he was expecting them to do. So he spent another forty-five minute answering their questions and repeating in essence what his presentation was all about. As a result, Justin ran out of time and had to schedule a second meeting with his team the following day to cover the other items on the agenda.

 

Following that meeting, Justin went back to his office and immediately sent an e-mail to each member of his sales team because he had forgotten to tell them the individual sales target that he had set for each one in order for his team to increase their sales revenues by 20% and achieve Goal no. 1. He also included the slides he had used during his presentation to make sure everyone had a copy.

 

The following day, Matthew, the newest and least experienced sales executive in the team, came to see Justin and confessed that because of his lack of sales experience and product knowledge, he was not very confident he could achieve the sales target that Justin gave him. “I think I am good at cold-calling but the problem is: I don’t know how to close a sale”. Matthew admitted sheepishly.

 

“Not to worry” Justin reassured him, “For a couple of hours, every Friday afternoon, I will personally train you on sales techniques as well as on the various products we sell. Within a few months, you will become a top performer!!!” Matthew thanked his junior manager and left his office genuinely relieved, knowing that Justin was not only considered to have the most comprehensive product knowledge of anyone in the company but among the sales executives and most of the junior sales managers, he was also known to be the best at closing deals.

 

On another front, Justin was having difficulty working with Martina because she was rude, belittled him at every opportunity and never allowed him to take any kind of initiative. At the beginning, Justin thought that this was just a matter of personality clash but within a month of his promotion, he started hearing similar complaints from the other nine junior sales managers reporting to Martina.

 

“Frankly Justin,” confided Siew Peng, one of the other junior sales managers, “in the four years that I have reported to Martina, not once had she congratulated me or my team for a job well done. Quite the contrary actually: for the 2014 financial year, my sales team not only managed to meet its sales quota, we exceeded it by 50% and while the company CEO sent an e-mail to everyone in the company in which he congratulated each member of our team, Martina did not even mention our achievement during any of her sales meetings. Worse still, she started spreading a rumour that we might have counted sales that were actually closed during the 2013 financial year to inflate our 2014 sales figure. This is obviously not true because the sales figure calculations were not done by me but by the financial controller of the company!!!”

 

Timothy, another junior sales manager reporting to Martina, added: “What’s the most amazing thing about Martina is that everyone here wonders how on earth she could get promoted twice to her current senior manager’s position although her product knowledge is horrible. To hide her ignorance, she always asks a junior sales manager to come along with her on large account sales calls so that she does not have to answer product-related questions. She is also the worst motivator in the whole company: I heard that the turnover rate among the junior sales executives reporting to her has been 75% every year since she

was promoted to a senior sales management position while the turnover rate for the staff reporting to the other senior managers is not even 10%.”

 

Alicia, also a junior sales manager, added that Martina could not even organise and divide the sales territories properly. “Do you know that Martina likes to assign two sales teams the same accounts? Not because these accounts are large and need more than a sales team to serve them, but because she thinks that this way, the two sales teams will be forced to compete among themselves to win each sales to these accounts. But the result is that the two sales teams end up fighting with each other all the time, the working climate is terrible and in the end, these accounts buy from our competitors when they realise that they have to deal with two S&S sales teams instead of one and that we are fighting with one another!!!”

 

“One more thing that I must say” added Siew Peng. “Martina can see market opportunities like no other in this company, not even the CEO”. “What do you mean?” Justin asked.

“Well last year, she singlehandedly convinced the CEO that our company should start offering two new product lines, digital products and cloud services, to complement our traditional office furniture product lines. Not only that, she also convinced the CEO that S&S should work towards offering its own integrated digital and furniture products like Wi-Fi-enabled office desks and chairs. That was brilliant because these initiatives have been very profitable.”

 

“Wow, I did not know that”, Justin said. “Yeah”, added Timothy. “And look at her sales track record. I was told that every year, Martina exceeds her sales targets. In fact, she has been the top sales performer in the company for the last five years. That should explain why she is where she is, shouldn't it?” Little did Justin know that later that year, he would find out why Martina was the company’s top sales performer.

 

It happened one evening when Justin was working late at the office when he found a confidential e-mail that Martina had left by mistake in the output tray of the office printer.

In the e-mail sent a week earlier to a certain Allan Smith, the purchasing manager of AppleSung Pte Ltd, Martha was requesting a face-to-face meeting at a nearby restaurant after working hours so she could explain to him how she “would show her gratitude” if Allan “were to award to Sigmund & Shubert a $6 million contract to supply 12,000 digital tablets to AppleSung, “even though” Martina added in her e-mail “our quote is 60% higher than the lowest bid from one of our top competitors, as you so kindly shared with me in confidence”.

 

Justin felt extremely uncomfortable about this e-mail as it clearly hinted that Martina was not above dishing out financial favours to win large sales contracts and earn generous commissions as a result. Because there was a clear code of ethics in the company that forbids such activities, Justin wanted to report this incident to the company’s CEO but he was afraid to do so.

 

“Yes, the last 7 months have indeed been eventful”, Justin murmured to himself. “Now what?”

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Question 1

(a) Identify and describe in your own words the three (3) essential skills that managers should be sufficiently competent to use in their daily work. Use an example from your organisation or one with which you are familiar to support your answer. (For that purpose, you must identify the industry in which your organisation operates as well as the title(s) of the managerial position(s) used in your example).

(12 marks)

(b) Identify the managerial skills that Justin and Martina have used in the scenario above and indicate for each one of these skills the level of competence (high, average or low) that Justin and Martina have each demonstrated. Provide reasons for your assessment.

Your answer should follow the format of the table below. Note that if, according to you, one or more of the 3 managerial skills is not being demonstrated by either Justin or Martina, simply indicate the skill and the mention: “not demonstrated in the case study”.

(18 marks)

	Demonstrated managerial skills	Skill level competence (high, average or low)	Reasons supporting your assessment of this manager’s skill level competence
JUSTIN
MARTHA