Zarate Tech has a sales group of 120 located in Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, London, and Sydney. The sales group generates and qualifies leads, meets with existing and potential customers, negotiates deals, and offers technology solutions, focusing primarily on customer relationship management (CRM). The sales force conveys requirements to Zarate’s offices in Chicago and London, matching staff capacity with the quantities and types of products needed. The sales group also performs customer service functions, including tracking and confirming delivery and quality of products and solutions. Overall, the sales group moves $2.1 billion of products and consulting services each year.

Traditionally, the company’s philosophy was that the sales staff must remain small and in close contact; therefore, they meet in person frequently in either London or Chicago. They see their manufacturing facilities as marketing tools to demonstrate the company’s commitment to quality, on-time delivery, and products customized to meet specifications. Despite its focus on providing the latest in CRM technology for its customers, the COO, Jan Ciampi, who oversees Zarate’s accounting, finance, and information system, feels the company is behind in its use of technology to manage its sales, sales group interactions, and team communication and problem solving. While Zarate has e-mail, an intranet, and a state-of-the-art internal accounting and telecommunications system, the company rarely uses its technology for team interactions and communication.

Although all salespeople have laptops to use on the road, they use them primarily for generating reports and handling e-mail.

You have recently been hired as the new vice president of worldwide sales to help modernize the work processes of the sales group. Senior management is particularly interested in your improving how the company communicates across distances, shares and captures company information, and makes use of computer technology for client and team meetings. They feel the sales group spends too much time and money flying to meetings and even commuting to work. They know some direct contact with customers is important as well as internal meetings of the sales team, which usually consist of a sales rep, an account manager, a technical engineer, a logistics coordinator, and an IT technician;

however, they wonder if some of these meetings could be handled virtually.

They are also considering using a remote sales force structure, with the salespeople working from their homes instead of coming into the office, which they think would allow them to cut office overhead.

Last week at the company’s annual budget planning meeting in Chicago, Ciampi announced the formation of a team to investigate how best to move the sales group toward using virtual team technology and how to encourage them to use the Intranet, Web technology, and Web conferencing to connect, manage accounts, and work and meet directly online. You will be heading up the team. Your charge is to determine what it will take to ensure that the sales group accepts the new way of working and knows how to work effectively as a virtual team.

Once you have decided whom to include from your sales group and from the training, development, and communication departments, you need to draft an e-mail or a meeting request announcing the project to the team and scheduling the team launch. One of your immediate challenges is that your team will be scattered across all the offices, with many of them on the road constantly, so you must confront the challenges of working virtually. In fact, you realize that this team could end up serving as a model for how to work effectively as a virtual team, but you also realize that motivating the sales group to change from their current ways of working and providing the training they need to work effectively using virtual technology will be a challenge.

The Assignment Draft the e-mail or meeting request to your team establishing the project objectives and inviting them to the team launch, which you have decided to hold in person in the Chicago office. Then, establish an agenda for the meeting and your approach to working as a team. Next, outline what you see as the challenges to this project and some of the best practices in working virtually that you think will help your team get off to a good start. Finally, note the type of interactive tools you will want to include in the team’s shared workspace and why these tools will be helpful