Chapter 17 - Personal Selling and Sales Management

Personal Selling

Digicel employs Corporate Sales Executives across it markets with the responsibility  to grow recurring Sales revenues through assigned channels and to build and develop relationships with relevant leads in accordance with business strategy.

 

The Sales Executives identify and pursue opportunities for increasing Digicel’s market share. This is achieved through not only the dealer channel network, responsible for retail sales but  very importantly, direct sales to corporate clients. In a nutshell, the role of sales is to maintain and increase subscriber numbers and enhance the sales of handsets.

Corporate Sales at Digicel encompasses three areas; corporate sales, recharge sales, i.e. sales of electronic and physical vouchers and the all important dealer channel. When selecting  Sales Executives for personal selling, Digicel's  philosophy is “hire the attitude, train the skill.” "It’s instinctive, an attitude that is seen right away". In recruiting members of the team, the company looks for the passion to satisfy the customer.

 

This philosophy has served the company well as today, Digicel through the efforts of its 30-odd members, provides services to a slew of top companies in just about all the major industries tourism, mining, manufacturing, banking, agriculture, finance.

 

It seems an enormous feat for a department with just over 30 persons on the team but  the strength of the corporate sales unit is the team’s passion and commitment coupled with Digicel’s product offering and customer service delivery.   Each Sales Executive is given a preset sales target against which commission is paid.  These targets are agreed upon at the Executive level in keeping with the overall revenue targets.

Not one for encouraging complacency, the sales team works in tandem with the Personal Corporate Customer Care Unit a ’hot team’ designed to devise and implement strategies to enhance the service provided to Digicel customers.

 

As the market matures, it is critical that  the focus be on maintaining and retaining customers .  The focus is not only need to retain the current customers, but also to seek to offer new and innovative products. For example, Digicel continues to explore and implement new and innovative ways to recharge phones. Currently, Digicel have over 10 including  directflex, flexcard, webflex, Teleflex and bankflex.

 

Sales Management

Digicel Sales Management Team focuses on the following objectives to ensure that Sales revenues are met and surpassed :

·         Formulation of sales strategy through development of account management policies, sales force compensation policies, sales revenue forecasts, and sales plan.

·         Implementation of sales strategy through selecting, training, motivating, and supporting the sales force, setting sales revenue targets.

·         Sales force management through development and implementation of sales performance, monitoring, and evaluation methods, and analysis of associated behavioral patterns and costs.

Sales Cloud by Salesforce.com helps Digicel standardise business-to-business sales processes across 25 countries, 13 currencies and 4 languages .  After analysing and examining the functionality, technical and integration system capabilities of several leading CRM platforms Digicel determined that the best platform to serve their needs was Salesforce.com.

Digicel acquired the Sales Cloud Enterprise Edition because of its robust sales functionalities, mobility, scalability and state-of-the-art dashboards and reports. The company now has a single platform to manage all sales-related activities.

 

Digicel therefore is able to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on closing deals. For sales managers, the Sales Cloud gives real-time visibility into their teams’ activities and performance results.  Best of all, it’s all in the cloud, everyone can access the Sales Cloud with just an Internet connection—there’s no need for expensive hardware or software.

  
 
 

In the future, the salesforce.com platform will allow Digicel the ability to customise and integrate CRM for the entire B2B business, automate business process, manage complex sales territories, interact with partners, access additional AppExchange applications and integrate with any system. The benefit of using Salesforce.com for forecasting, sales pipeline and business processes to standardise information across the group is invaluable to Digicel's success.