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Leadership Challenge: a Quote by Any Other Name

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Submitted By victoriasedberg
Words 467
Pages 2
As the director of sales for the company of Bright Right Plastics, Ralph Dickerson has been through many changes inside the company and he recognized that a new change was needed when it came to the quota system. The old quota system had given the company great success through the years; however, over the last couple of years the company received complaints from customers about product service. When Dickerson had been called for a meeting with the CEO he knew he had to make a decision for the company’s future; should they stay with the old quota system or should they move forward with a new quota system based on the activity quota system?
Answers to Leadership Challenge Questions
1. An advantage of the sales volume quota is that it emphasizes the dollar sale and that the quota is related to the market potential and that makes the quota more credible and easy to understand for the salesperson. The sales volume quota is also consistent with what the salesperson visualizes his or hers job to be – which is to sell. Another advantage is how the firm expresses their sales volume quota which can be in dollars, physical units or points. The firm can, for example, present that for each dollar sold from a particular product the salesperson receives a certain number of points. The sales volume quota also allows the sales managers to design their own quota system that can promote certain desired goals, which could be that they set last year’s sales volume quota as a foundation for the current year as a motivation to “beat last year’s sale” and take the sale to the next level.
A disadvantage of the sales volume quota would be that it is easy to ignore the current condition of the sales volume and focus too much on the previous year’s sales volume. That can result in forgetting or not even noticing those territories that might be growing bigger at the moment just because they

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