Kevin Durant is a district sales manager for Western Steel Fabricators, a manufacturer and marketer of a wide variety of steel components for the construction industry. Prior to joining Western, Kevin was a salesperson for one of Western’s major competitors. He was recruited and hired by Western partly because of his philosophy on personal selling. Kevin’s philosophy is customer-oriented and based on three premises. First, to succeed in sales requires the proper attitude. That is, a salesperson should have a positive, forward-looking, non-defeatist, cooperative attitude. Second, a salesperson should show initiative. Kevin believes “that things don’t happen until you take the right actions to make them happen.” Third, salespeople should be aggressive, but never manipulative or unethical. Kevin is convinced that honest and ethical behaviors lead to long-term, trusting relationships.

Current Situation

Kevin is now in the process of a year-end evaluation of his salespeople. When the year began, he met with each salesperson to explain the criteria on which their performance would be judged. Several quotas were determined, including a sales dollar quota, new account quota, and sales call quota. The relative importance of each of these quotas was determined by the following weighting system: a weight factor of 4 for new accounts, 3 for sales dollars generated, and 2 for sales calls. It was also explained to the salespeople that their performance would also be evaluated by the number of customer complaints received and by the extent to which they submitted required reports. Finally, salespeople would be judged on their ability to meet customer needs. This includes salespeople’s ability to suggest ideas for promoting business, helping customers solve problems, finding answers to customer questions not readily known, returning customers’ calls, and delivering what is promised.

At a recent leadership seminar, Kevin learned about the 360-degree performance appraisal process that involves getting feedback from multiple sources. Kevin thought this would be an ideal way to evaluate his salespeople and decided he would have each salesperson give a questionnaire to a customer, a sales team member, and a member of Western’s customer service unit to evaluate that salesperson’s performance. Each questionnaire contained the following questions: (1) How often did you have contact with this salesperson over the course of the year? (2) Were you able to work closely with this salesperson to satisfy your needs? (3) Overall, how would you evaluate this salesperson’s performance? (4) How satisfied are you with this salesperson? The questionnaire was to be signed by the respondent and returned to the salesperson who would then submit it to Kevin for review. Kevin figured that if he noticed something in the responses he did not like, he would discuss it with the salesperson. Kevin thought that evaluating quota achievement would be a fairly straightforward process and that he could easily determine discrepancies and make salespeople aware of their shortcomings.

Questions

1. What do you think about the type of feedback Kevin is willing to provide his salespeople? How do you suggest performance feedback be handled?

2. What can Kevin do to ensure that his salespeople make efforts to improve their performance in the areas he deems important?