Sales and Marketing assistant position – further background
December 2006
In order to background and assist applicants with information so as to avoid some points being missed during interviews while possibly reducing the time spent with discussion details during each interview, the following information should be especially noted.
- This position is coming available because of transfers (on promotion) of existing sales office staff to other positions in the company.
- A new Sales Managers position is currently being created and an appointment is immanent. This person will gradually replace me in my sales role.
- Sales management and administration in this company can be very different from the role in many other companies.
- We rarely have to sell the products in the traditional sense that retail or consumer products are sold. We have a distribution of some 80 international distributors (about 50 of these are active) and they sell the products. Mostly our task is to support these national distributors.
- The exception to a (above) is the NZ Market. We have a very close relationship with the NZ Fire Service, and the St. John Ambulance. These organizations are our “home” base and buy our products exclusively. We need to sheppard them closely by regular visits, constant communications and support for their safety and operations.
- Very few of our international distributors can provide annual sales forecasts, budgets or projections although we of course do forecasts. While there is now a substantial volume of base repeat business which has come about through winning previous tenders, growing the business comes almost exclusively from winning new tenders and improving or extending the international distributor network in countries where we are still not adequately represented.
- Our international distributors come into us by email (on a daily basis) requesting support, technical advice, prices and availability for new quotations and tenders. It has become a huge workload, and the vast majority of the role of the Sales office staff is to respond to these enquiries and to assist our worldwide distributors to promote and sell our products. Some tender and quotes can be dealt with in a few hours, some take hundreds of hours and may have very tight time frames.
- There is almost no such thing as a standard helmet. While there is a very large number of existing part numbers referencing existing helmets each finished helmet has a unique stock code, which reflects the country it is sold to/colour/specification/end user/ etc. There are about 5000 stock numbers although the only difference between most is the shell colour and there are more that 20 colours.
- Because we are physically so far removed from our distributors and end-users, we place very great importance on the sales staff responding to customer enquiries. Many enquiries come in over night by fax or email, and we expect the sales staff to respond to these with at least an acknowledgement within the next working day, even if a full quotation or detailed response takes several more days/weeks. We assist our distributors with freight quotes and shipment arrangements as we have close relationships with international freight forwarders.
- The Sales staff (indeed the whole administrative staff) have very close roles with the factory and production. There are meetings each Monday morning and additional meetings are held as necessary. The Sales staff need to have a clear understanding of factory production issues by not placing completely unreasonable demands, but at the end of the day we run the factory, they don’t run us.
Being a small office, there are few boundaries between roles and while most staff have core skills related to their specific responsibilities, they share and support each other when the pressure is on. We have a rule that the days work is not finished till everybody is finished, and with an office that is open for at least 10 hours each day there is a considerable amount of flexi-time now worked and office hours sometimes go outside 5 days per week.
One of the most important aspects of the helmets that come out of this factory is the Standards that they meet and exceed. We take great pride saving lives and strive to provide helmets that don’t just meet the Standard but exceed the minimum performance requirements especially for impacts, heat and flame their home nations and don’t bother quite so much with foreign certifications.
Our base Standards are joint NZ/Australian and we hold these whereas most other helmet manufacturers don’t. These Standards are not recognized in the Northern Hemisphere, so we also hold European and US Standards for selected products. These Standards plus our ISO 9001 certification place a huge overlay of effort and cost on the company but are essential to this business.
- Initially it wil be necessary for new Sales staff to have some work experience on aspects of what happens on the factory floor. While this is not likely to involve all aspects of factory work, some assembly experience will give new people who are completely unaware of component parts for helmets the chance to learn the names and functions.
There are some marketing roles in this position. We do most of our own photography and help design any literature that is produced for us. We also design most of our own international advertisements, produce our own PowerPoint presentations and prepare for Trade exhibitions that the company attends. Occasionally sales staff may be required to travel certainly within NZ and sometimes overseas to support a new Distributor, attend a trade show or other event.
This is an important role in the company. We will be looking for a person who can demonstrate characteristics that can basically be described as CUSTOMERS, CUSTOMERS, CUSTOMERS. They can drive you mad, but they are the reason we exist, and you must convince us that you have a love for dealing with them.
D.W.A.Bennett.
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