Problematic Situation: Failure to meet monthly sales quota


            Our company is owned and headed by a foreign businessman.  As a sales manager, I am responsible to cater the major needs of our distributors as well as stimulate big projects.  Aside from this, I am also responsible to manage three sales coordinators who in turn resolve minor difficulties of distributors and entertain project queries.  Half of the long-time distributors are foreigners and I have been doing business with them for five years now.  At least half of the big projects are given to these long-time distributors while the remaining projects are provided to new distributors which are both intended to flare their enthusiasm to continue pushing our products.  From distributor’s orders, our team derives monthly sales performance.     


 


            The challenging part for me is to nourish the relationship using my technical, managerial and personal relation skills within a familiar but complex and ever-changing working environment.  My experience shows that merely maintaining and improving distributor relations does not automatically result to excellent monthly sales performance (in which my team regularly gets during my early years), or at least, meeting the monthly sales quota.  I am aware that sales is a very dynamic job but I performed well in the first two to three years as reflected by my team performance.  I also came into this bathroom fixtures company as a sales manager already but it seems year-on-year my team performance go from constant to declining.


 


            This is a problematic situation for me because I feel that my falling performance does not reflect my capability and experience.  Aside from this, I feel that I am not compensated for the effort I have done for a specific month whenever my team fails to meet the quota.  I loose my monetary incentives, chance of promotion, professional gratification and self-esteem.  This created a vicious cycle of de-motivation (I am oftentimes irritated that I intentionally pressure and make my subordinates uneasy), lost of work focus (I admit I almost apply to a direct competitor for higher compensation and new work environment) and sometimes financial trouble.  Failure to meet monthly quota is a problematic situation since it is the only quantitative, and at most times, rational way to evaluate sales managers’ performance.


 


Choosing Relevant Metaphors and Evaluation Criteria


            Metaphors are useful to determine critical issues in a problematic situation which can aid decision-makers in implementing an effective solution.  However, there can be numerous ways to view the problematic situation that makes metaphor pool doubtful in use.  In view of this, there is the need to highlight only those relevant metaphors.  Using creative thinking, “Failure to meet monthly sales quota” can be viewed in three ways: namely: “falling star dilemma”, “fleet retreat scenario” and “unfilled fisherman’s net”.  First, when the star player of a basketball team looses an important match, he becomes frustrated because the expectations of his coach, team players and fans are not met.  In addition, his skills and efforts are undermined by the loss.  In view of the effect to the person and output responses, “Falling star dilemma” is relevant to the problematic situation as there is an immediate emotional setback felt by the star player with respect to the expectation on how he will carry his team towards the win.


 


            The second metaphor is the position of a surviving ancient war commander after retreating from a confrontation.  “Fleet retreat scenario” is relevant primarily because of the characteristics of the commander and nature of the task.  The commander has technical and leadership skills as well as experience when going into a war.  However, his remarkable qualities are basically useful to boost the moral not the fighting abilities or armory of his fleet.  The nature of the task is to win in whatever means that can undermine his brilliance or charisma in favor of confrontation outcomes.  In this example, he is likely to receive applause or punishment to his king depending on the palace strategy.  In effect, even though he thought he done the right thing as the enemy is heavily loaded with ammunitions, the reward is blurred.


 


            Finally, when a fisherman did not catch the level of fish he expects even though he learned that the water is full of those, he would think that he was told a lie.  However, the task environment might not be favorable on that specific day.  Tide is too high or it is off-season or other fishermen already got the bulk of fish before him.  “Unfilled fisherman’s net” is relevant to the problematic situation since the task environment is affected by many factors in which the fisherman can be aware but no choice but to try his luck due to the vitality of the task.


The Major and Minor Metaphor


            To identify the major and minor metaphors is crucial in accomplishing the latter stages of the total systems intervention (TSI).  Since major metaphor has direct relation to the problematic problem, vital issues to consider can be recognized that will help us in choosing the most appropriate model and methodology to arrive at a solution.  Also, distinguishing major and minor metaphor can polish our knowledge on what specific issues should be addressed with immediacy.  In doing so, we can pinpoint the areas of the organization (may it be in finance, human resource, sales, manufacturing, etc.) from these identified issues that might need restructuring/ reinforcement.  There should be a dependent (minor) metaphor to be able to come-up with specific and concrete findings that the dominant (major) metaphor has.  The distinction is merely a technique to highlight critical issues that will aid in decision-making.       


       


            As we have identified the crucial elements/ criteria for evaluating the listed metaphors (see below), we have already tapped critical issues although in general terms such as people, process and environment.  By using figure 1, we can define the major and minor metaphors based on how they relate to the criteria of the problematic situation.  By merely looking the table, it is obvious that the “falling star dilemma” should be the major metaphor as it is highly related to the 4 and 5 criteria of the problematic situation while maintaining an acceptable level of relatedness to 1, 2 and 3.  However, 4 and 5 criteria are at the end of a flow chart (see figure 2).  The impact of responses and its perceived effect may



 


Figure 1: Benchmarking


Criteria


 


Situation


Characteristics of the main person (1)


Nature of the task


(2)


Task environmental factors


(3)


Nature of Output Responses


(4)


Effect to the main person (5)


Failure to meet monthly sales quota


Customer-driven, uses leadership and relational skills; Has limited control with sales coordinators performance; Bounded with corporate policies


Formalized internally but informal/ negotiation-based to distributors; Team-based; Minor issues of distributors has a potential to evolve especially on relationship/ behavioral matters; Firm and distributors are profit-driven 


Sanitary sector sensitive to price changes; Organizational change can “shock” distributors; Distributors communication can be initiated by other employees


Direct accountability to owner and customer; Member de-motivation; Absence of monetary incentives; Loss of promotional criteria; Peer comparison


Professional; Personal; Emotional; Monetary 


Falling star dilemma


Driven by self-motivation; Can enhance other players by passing the ball; Can bypass coach rules but not the rules of the game **


Dynamic; Can change approach depending on the instances; Team-Based; Past games are irrelevant to future evaluation except on key games **


Injuries and other court events can instantly loose the change to advance; Changes affect team performance ***


Highly related


Highly related


Fleet retreat scenario


Highly related


Highly related


War is highly dependent on the capabilities of conflicting sides; On the contrary, plan leakage, unprepared defense and “surprises” can undermine capabilities **


Accountable to the king but not the public; Can increase battalion capability and plan for revenge; Blurred outcome *


Blurred; Can even increase motivation to revenge *


Unfilled fisherman’s net


Uses experience and some technical abilities; Driven by economic motivation; Independent without strict rules *


 


 


 


Informal; If no catch today, it does not follow that this will repeat tomorrow; Result- and luck-based *


Highly related


No accountability as the task is bounded by the rules of nature *


Monetary and economic; Rare emotional or personal effect *


Note: * Not related, ** Quite related, *** Fairly related


 


 


Figure 2: Flow Chart of “Failure to meet monthly sales quota”


 


 


 


 


 




 


not follow their obvious results to the person if the star player/ sales manager are aware that their characteristics and the execution are affected by outside forces beyond their control.  In the contrary, the “unfilled fisherman’s net” highly satisfies this lacking.  Although this is the only related factor of this metaphor to the problematic situation, it should be noted that it is a one-man task whereas the two other metaphors are team effort.


 


            Again, the purpose of finding major and minor metaphors is to determine critical issues of the problematic situation and not to find a condition that merely conforms to the nature of its main actor, task, task environment, responses and main actor effect.  If figure 1 will be read vertically, it will be observed that the three metaphors are related to the problematic situation under the task environmental factor criteria.  Astonishingly, the non- team-based situation “unfilled fisherman’s net” recorded highest relatedness.  This means that even in non-team setting the criteria is relevant to the main actor’s level of success in completing the task and gets his desired responses/ recognition.  This rationale makes “unfilled fisherman’s net” the major metaphor while “falling star dilemma”.      


 


            The “fleet retreat scenario” is dropped because it is focused on the obvious and manageable criteria 1 and 2 while it has unclear explanation of 4 and 5.  Although it is highly related in 1 and 2, this can be undermined because such factors are already recognizable to the sales manager as he noted in the introduction that he has the “skills and five-year experience” while sales department is “dynamic”.  However, it is to be assumed that he already tried to maximize his abilities to address the problematic situation and truly aware on how to handle the dynamism of the job to make be able to undermine these criteria.  In addition, with reference to the environmental ambiguities of the task, it is assumed (and is actually experiencing) that information systems of the company is limited to quantitative data and major qualitative ones.  In effect, it relies not only on the initiative of the manager, and more importantly, to the luck of the company that outside forces would be favorable or somehow controllable.               


             


The Methodology for the Task Environmental Factors


            After we have identified the major metaphor, the focus now is on the critical factor of the problematic situation.  Metaphors are merely means to creative thinking while determination of critical factor is the end.  Task environmental factor (onwards will be called as outside factors) is under a complex system since the interaction of the sales manager and distributors is largely loose while the former and the company owner are undetermined since their relationship and company policies are customer-driven.  In addition, the system is evolving due to product cycles and relationship building, it is highly influenced by behavior and largely open to environment.  With regards to participants dimension, outside factors operate within a pluralist relationship.  This is because participants (sales manager, owner and distributors) have basic compatibility of interest to maximize product sales.  Although there are conflicts in addressing extra-distributor’s requests, compromise is possible (see figure 3). 


Figure 3: The System of System Methodologies Table



            Being a complex-pluralist of the problematic situation, soft systems methodology (SSM) will be used (1999).  As SSM will serve as the methodology, rich picture, CATWOE determination and conceptual model should be derived and evaluated.  As shown in figure 4, the sales manager serves as the middleman between the business relationship of the owner and distributor.  As observed, the owner’s only reference of his performance is sales quota.  However, outside forces that was resolved by the sales manager was hardly included in the evaluation.  As he also cannot identify and address the all order hindrances created by the outside forces including the independence of distributor decision, the resolution effort will totally be unmerited/ awarded.  He does not receive monthly incentives, performance appraisal, recognition and even subordinate trust. 


 


Using figure 5, the root definition of the sales system will be, “The sales manager is the intermediary, under the direction of the owner, to resolve any conflicts regarding their distributor policies and relations in any way possible as


Figure 4: Rich Picture (Sales Managers’ Tasks)



Figure 5: CATWOE Determination


 


Sales Manager


Distributor


Owner


Customer (Beneficiary)


All


All


All


Actor (Performers)


All


All


All


Transformation (Core activity)


Intermediary between parties


Ordering


Monitoring/ Action


Worldview (Underlying system’s belief)


I can resolve any conflicts by negotiation skills


Customer is always right


We need customers to sustain business


Owner (The Appraiser)


Owner


Owner


Owner


Environment (Constraints)


Obtaining quota


Also have other businesses


Also have other concerns


 


to foster customer-driven approach.  Otherwise, we (distributors) will not further order or resort into a direct communication with the owner for more abrupt action.”  As the sales manager and owner are customer-centered, the conceptual model in figure 6 (see below) becomes significant.  This illustration does not define the real world yet because there are also versions of the sales manager and owner’s view of the system.  As illustration 5 is regarded as operational activities, its use is appreciated when these activities are decomposed to monitor their achievement and control the quality of each activity execution (2004).


 


Figure 6: The Conceptual Model of the Business System (Distributor’s View)     


 


 


                 


 


 



Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com


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