Hp Sales Force

Hp was not performing very well before it was over taken by Hurd.At that time, it was very difficult to evaluate that which type of sales force structure was being used. the HP reps were responsible for so many products that they always used to confuse the information of each product with one another and always failed to help a customer in providing information about a specific product. Hence the customers became frustrated with HP's unresponsive sales force. The sales force of HP divided their products into three main divisions: the personal system group, the technology solutions group an the image and printing group. The salespeople were responsible for selling the products from all the divisions and had to directly report to the sutomers sales group. Due to alot of workload in management, the process between the salespeople and the customers were very slow which led the custmers to be frustrated and the company became very unresponsive.

To improve the management and overall progress of HP, Hurd took over the company and restructured the sales structure of HP. Hurd destroyed the customer sales group division, this helped the company in a huge way. Now the salesman were requiredto work for a small number of products and they were asked to study the product and its specifications thoroughly. By now every salespeople were assigned into their particular small areas for expertising. Then HP started to focus onto the customers and the role a customer plays in the sales process. Hurd further worked hard on making the customers more satisfied. He gave his customers the right to participate aand give suggestions in account planning and strategy development of HP, making the customers feel like a family of HP. Hurd did his best in imprving the situation and making a good relationship between the company and the customers. He also worked individually with all the cutomers in order for the growth of the business. This new strategy of sales force was known as Complex sales Force. A Complex sales Force is basically a combination of two sales forces. In the case of HP, the two forces were: Product sales force and Customers sale force. Product sales force is when a salespeople is the expertise of a specific product and has all the relevant information about that product. Customer sales force is where sales forces may be set up for different industries and in doing this servicing the current customers instedad of focusing on gaining new customers.