Prioritizing Factors to Foster Improvement of Sales Operations in Small- and Medium-Sized Industrial Organizations

Abstract

Small- and medium-sized companies depend heavily on their internal configuration to achieve their goals, generate profit, and remain competitive. The performance of the sales department is often crucial for this. Decision-makers need to understand how to coordinate the sales force’s operations while considering team members’ communication and commitment. This article presents an approach to prioritize factors that will improve the operations of the sales department in small- and medium-sized companies in the industrial sector. To achieve this, we adopted the soft modeling approach by (1) outlining a conceptual model that identifies the factors that can lead to improvements based on the literature and (2) using the analytical hierarchy process to validate a construct and prioritize the factors. This study is focused on the organizational domain and involves the participation of sixty employees from medium-sized Mexican companies with at least five years of experience. The results indicate that the factors that foster improvement in sales department operations are communication improvement, failure prevention, workload alignment, and adequate integration of human efforts with technology without neglecting coordination and management mechanisms. This article could encourage academics and practitioners to adopt the soft modeling approach to adopt new courses of action based on continuous learning and improve organizational cohesion.

Keywords

• adaptability
• viability
• performance
• management
• salesperson