Think Big, Act Small: How America's Best Performing Companies Keep the Start-up Spirit Alive by Jason Jennings

Author:Jason Jennings
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781101118214
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2005-05-04T14:00:00+00:00

Separate Sales Forces

Medline makes more than 125,000 SKUs available to their customers. Such a huge number of items would make it very difficult for a salesperson to even be aware of all the company’s offerings much less have adequate product knowledge to represent them all. Medline’s response to this potential dilemma is another example of how the company thinks big but acts small: they have four separate sales departments covering the nation.

“Up until 1985,” says Mills, “the company had a single sales force that called on all prospects and customers. That year we came out with a sales force dedicated to nursing homes and long-term care facilities. Even though hospitals and nursing homes purchase some of the same products, the sales approach used on each is vastly different.”

Reorganizing the company into two separate sales forces worked so well that, within a few years, Medline added another sales force dedicated to skin and wound care. “We acquired the right to represent the products of another skin-care company,” says Mills, “and so we took over their sales force, added in our salespeople who’d been selling skin and wound care, and began growing a separate sales force. Our fourth sales force sells textiles: linens, sheets, pillowcases, mattresses, lab coats, and reusable gowns.” Medline has 300 salespeople in their nursing home and long-term care markets, another 350 in the general hospital line, and approximately 50 each in the textile and skin- and wound-care sales forces. Recently, Medline has added sales forces for surgery centers, physicians’ offices, original equipment manufacturers, and retail.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.