Professional Selling and Sales Management

Background

Crustident Ltd is a joint venture company formed with Reckitt Benckiser and Colgate Palmolive. It has recently developed a Nurofen based toothpaste which is highly effective for consumers suffering from toothache.

The toothpaste will be developed and packaged as any ordinary toothpaste as well as having a similar taste. The Nurofen logo and colours will play a predominant part in the packaging. The product will be classified as POM (Pharmacists only medicine) meaning that only medically qualified practitioners and pharmacists would be able to sell the product. Consumers will not be allowed to purchase the product without approval of a dentist or pharmacists.    

Although the product can be legally advertised it is felt that the brand should be positioned as a medically recommended product with the dentist playing a major consumer behaviour influencer to patients.  Therefore the product will be actively sold by the dentists to customers and appropriate sales promotion discounts have been built into the Manufacturing Selling Price (MSP) to encourage and financially recompense dentists to sell the toothpaste.  

As part of their sales and marketing strategy the company would like to target dentist as their main point of sales and distribution.  The product is perceived by the company as being a serious recommended by an expert brand rather than one that consumers can simply buy from retailers such as Chemists and Supermarkets.  Dentists have been identified as a key target to recommend and sell the product to their patients.

The Assignment Brief

You are the Sales Representative of Crustident Ltd operating in the Kingston-upon-Thames area.  Your task is to develop a full sales plan for your territory detailing how the product will be sold to dentists.

The Task

To a produce a report of maximum 1,500 words on developing a plan, with a simple one page Excel spreadsheet documenting the plan – the report and plan should be built using the following: 

• The Kingston- Upon - Thames area is very large and you need to choose the regions that reflect the best opportunity and return on investment.  Therefore determine criteria to define the Kingston – Upon – Thames area – decide and list the factors of how you would include and reject regions of the KUT area.
• Identify and utilise secondary information sources to identify the total number of dental practices.
• Identify and utilise secondary sources to identify different types of dental practices – small independent practices versus large multiple chains
• Decide whether you will work with all of the practices or only with a selected few – discuss the criteria which you have used to decide upon this. 
• Determine the sales objective – the total number of tubes of toothpaste that you think could be sold in the Kingston area.  Assume a unit price of £5 as well the product being available in only one type – you will need to make assumptions about the units adopted at launch as well as maintenance phases.
• Determine the number and role of the different stakeholders that you will need to identify
• For each stakeholder determine the number of times you will need to visit each one, and what will be the purpose for each visit?
• How often do you think you feel that you will need to visit them to adopt the product?
• Once adopted how often should the dentists be visited in order to build and then to maintain good sales?
• What resources will you need to help support you during the calls
• The following selling costs are believed to be associated with the product:
1.  Salary for a single representative £25,000 a year
2. Car and expenses - £10,000 a year
3. Promotional material (detail aids) - £5,000 a year
4. Free Samples of toothpastes- £1,000 a year
5. Promotional gifts - £3,000 per year
6. Chocolates, tea and cakes for receptionists - £1,000 per year
7. Invitation to conferences - £10,000 per year
8. Wine and dining dentists – £5,000 per year
• Which items would you use and why to support sales in your territory?
• Do you expect the dentists to immediately buy the product?

• If not what objective will you have each time you visit the dentists?
• What would be the main features and benefits of the new toothpaste?
•  What key messages do you think you need to communicate to the dentist on each visit?

• If a salesman can visit 5 dental practices a day, how many sales representatives should you deploy at launch and following launch how many would you need to maintain sales?
• Using the sales promotional costs provided above what would be the annual profitability for your sales territory? – You will need to make assumptions relating to revenues and costs associated with launching the product and maintaining sales.  
• What would be the impact on profitability if only ½, or ¼ as well as doubling of budgeted unit sales were achieved as well as costs budgeted doubling or tripling, what would be the implication of pessimistic or optimistic forecasts?    

The report and spreadsheet should be submitted to undergraduate via the assignment as well as an electronic copy submitted on Thursday 17th August 2017 by 9am on CANVAS.

 Marking guidelines

40% - 49% - Students will be using core texts as well as other documents to build a sales plan and spreadsheet.  Although the plan will still be theoretical students will show an attempt to apply the concepts to the case in question.

50 – 59% - In addition to the above students will be making even fewer errors and making even more of an attempt to apply concepts to the case in question.  A couple of secondary sources utilised and justified

60 – 69% - Students should be writing with style and finesse with minimal errors and be able to develop a fully integrated sales plan.  Good range of secondary sources.

70%-79%-  In addition to the above, greater insights will be expected from student with seamless discussions between identifying the issues and objectives as well as rationalising activities required to achieve objectives. Finally one needs to justify issues, identifying objectives and activities to the appropriate underlying theoretical foundations. Several secondary sources would be identified and utilised.

>80% - As above but students would have conducted and appropriately interpreted implications of the different sensitivity analyses.