Marketing 468

Fall 2014
Semester Long Project

The semester-long project for this course is a paper. The paper should represent your best attempt to apply what
we discuss in the course by interacting with actual sales management professionals. Here is specifically what I
would like you to do:

1. Find a professional sales manager to interview. I want these to be professional, business-to-business
sales situations. In other words, dont interview someone in retail sales management
2. Do some background research on the company where your interview subject works. Learn as much as you
can ahead of time about the products/services they sell, the types of customers they sell to, and any other
background information you can collect. You dont want to show up for your interview and have your first
question be something like so what does your company do? You should know that ahead of time.

3. Conduct a one-on-one interview with your chosen sales manager. The outcome of your interview should be
an in-depth understanding of the roles, responsibilities, challenges, and opportunities that come along with a
sales management job. Here are the types of questions that I encourage you to ask during your sales
manager interview:
i. Describe the way your sales force is organized. Is it organized by product specialty, by
customer type, or as a generalist (geographical) sales force? Why is it organized in that
way?
ii. How do you motivate the salespeople who work for you to perform at the highest level?
iii. Do you get involved in recruiting and selecting salespeople who work under you? If so,
how much of your time is dedicated to this activity? What is your strategy for recruiting
and selecting new people?
iv. How is your sales force compensated? Salary? Commission? Bonus? Some combination?
How does this compensation relate to your efforts to motivate your salespeople? Does your
compensation strategy align well with your company goals?
v. What is your training strategy, both for new employees as well as maintenance training
for experienced salespeople? Are you involved in training?
vi. How do you evaluate the performance of your people? Are there different dimensions of
performance that you look at?
vii. What do you enjoy the most about your position as a manager of professional salespeople?
What are some of your biggest challenges?


4. Once you have conducted this interview, your next task is to write a paper that reports the insights you
gained from your interview. For the paper, you should begin with a brief description of the company that
the sales manager works for, the nature of their products or services, and the types of customers that they
work with. Then, tell about the interview. Dont just give me a verbatim transcript of the interview.
Rather, Id like you to both report on the content of what you learned in the interview, as well as reflect on
what you found most interesting, surprising, compelling, or whatever. Think about what these folks told
you, and what it means to you as someone who might just be working in sales in the near future.

5. At the end of your paper, I want you to provide me with an email address where I can potentially contact the
sales manager to verify that you did indeed conduct this interview. Not that I dont trust you but this
cannot be a gmail or yahoo email address. Make sure that it is a company email address where I can verify
that the interview actually took place. I dont intend to contact each and every person, but I will do a big
enough sample that I hope it will deter you from just pretending to conduct these interviews.

6. The paper is due at the beginning of class period on November 5
th,
as communicated on the syllabus. Late
papers will be penalized by 5 percent for each full day they are late, unless you talk to me about it ahead of
time and we reach an accommodation.

Here are some guidelines and suggestions:

I would shoot for 5-6 pages, double spaced, font 12, 1 inch margins, for each of the two papers. It is hard
to imagine how you could do a good, thorough job of doing this project in less than 10-12 total pages.

Do not bind the paper in any fancy way it makes it too hard to read and grade. Just a nice, secure staple in
the upper-left corner is fine. Number the pages.

Quality counts. You are late-stage seniors in college and need to be crafting written assignments with a high
degree of quality. Spelling and grammatical errors detract from the credibility of your work, both now and
in the future, so I will absolutely penalize you in terms of a grade for poor quality.

In total, the project is worth 20% of your class grade. That said, I encourage you to use this as an exercise
that goes beyond a grade in MKT 468. Use it as a way of learning more about sales and sales management
positions in companies or industries that might be of interest to you. Your professional life is about to start,
so Id encourage you to focus on success rather than grades.