Canada's Best Salesperson: Entering the Hall of Fame

This paper involves an evaluation of the sales process for Sport Chek in a bid to determine the connection between sales practices and the personal selling theory with the overall objective being the improvement of the company's current sales condition.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Overview of the Company, Product and Size of Sales Force

Sport Chek is a Canadian retail outlet that sells sports paraphernalia and apparel across Canada. This retailer is grouped among the FGL Sports' corporate banners, which also runs other stores such as Hockey Experts, Intersport, Econosports, National Sports and Service Shop (fglsports.com, 2016). Sport Chek takes pride in being the largest footwear, sporting goods and apparel store in the country with enough equipment to provide traction to clients on the path to wellness. Moreover, adoption of healthy lifestyles irrespective of social status, occupation or age epitomizes the Sport Chek's services blueprint and thus leading the pace in marshalling the society towards achieving an active and vibrant living.

According to fglsports.com (2016), Sport Chek's products include men and women's lifestyle clothing and shoes, winter pants and jackets, children's shoes and clothing, hockey sticks and skates, ski and snowboard equipment. Some of the clothing lines that customers can find at Sport Chek include Nike, Adidas, Fitbit, North Face and New Balance. The store also offers maintenance services for various sports gear to ensure a long and active lifestyle for their users. Sport Chek has a sales force of about 800 salesmen and women (fglsports.com, 2016).

Role of Sales Force in the Overall Marketing Program

Being the largest athletic sportswear retailer in Canada, Sport Chek's sales force is tasked with putting client's interest at the focal point of all the outlet's activities. The main duties entrusted to this team is cultivating differentiated experiences, pinpointing important customer segments as well as designing shopping experiences that are customized to suit the consumers' needs.

Furthermore, the sales force is key to delivering the store's online marketing programs. Sport Chek uses a website platform to reach out to customers across the country. Clients can log on to this website to check available products and services, products on offer, and make orders for their preferred goods. Additionally, they can post feedback about the quality of services offered by the store, which assists the sales force in identifying key areas to improve customer relationship management.

The sales team enables Sport Chek to perceive and treat customers individually. Through this team, the retailer can identify a client's profile, preferences and where he or she lives. Such information can then be used to adjust the store's sportswear and equipment, their mode and time of presentation to guarantee tailor-made product and service delivery. Moreover, this knowledge of particular customers enables Sport Chek to manufacture better products and possibly in larger quantities.

Approaches to Selling Used in the Company

According to Nowak (2014), Sport Chek has launched a flagship store at Metrotown mall that is geared towards sustaining an interactive relationship with clients and concurrently provides an alternative to the online sales mode. Through an interactive community hub at the flagship store, clients can make requests for having an event such as skiing marketed. Additionally, this store allows for show-rooming whereby clients can try new items prior to purchasing them online.

Online retailing is also used by the outlet, where customers make orders for specific orders and pay for them on delivery. Sport Chek posts products on its e-commerce platform. Customers then select the items they need, state their contact details and location and then wait for the items to be brought to them at their doorstep. Delivery is normally made within 5-7 business days from the time when an order was made.

To enhance delivery times, the retailer has a virtual store which is basically an online ordering shop and whose main objective is to deliver products on the same day to consumers who make orders before noon (Nowak, 2014). Additionally, Sport Chek plans to open 300 more outlets in the forthcoming years with most of them being megastores and will be more concentrated in British Columbia and Ontario (Nowak, 2014).

Customer Value Provided by the Sales Force

The primary role of a sales process is to create value for its customers but that is not the usual case. Too often, a salesperson tends to act like a human version of a product brochure, regurgitating all the product information which loses all the fundamental role of the sales process. The paramount goal of a sales process rather should be to create the value by understanding the challenges facing the client.in other words, the sales process can be termed as successful if the gap between what the customer is experiencing before the purchase and what they want to achieve is bridged and this is usually made accomplished when the salesperson makes a proposition through customer's eyes.

A critical analysis of Sport Chek's customer value status unearths a metamorphosed journey with current approach working to better not only to transform the sales effectiveness but also to protect its products from the price pressure. Moving from the perception of being a mass retailer, Sport Chek has excellently been able to keep up with the sweeping changes that are emphasizing more on personalized retail. The company takes a whole new approach to the sales process. it utilizes sports specialists who have impressive knowledge regarding the product-related sport. For instance, through a ski expert with a deep knowledge about the human foot, a client is given an appointment shopping experience. This approach does not only provide the client with the product but also, it offers a service, which is what turns mercantile perception into an experienced provider (Marketing).

Use of CRM, Databases and Other Technologies

CRM is an important tool for winning customer loyalty as it helps equalize the highs and lows experienced with clients who give positive and negative feedbacks respectively about the retailer's services. For Sport Chek, CRM adoption is evident in its marketing and community relations that essentially involve collaborative efforts that ensure the store's management gets acquainted with customer's needs and what the community expects from them when they visit Sport Chek to purchase products or get certain services.

CRM is aligned with the objectives of increasing sales, establishing the outlet's profitable consumers, understanding the consumer behaviour on both online and offline platforms, retaining the right clients. To achieve these objectives, Sport Chek adopts data mining approaches in managing clients' contacts, analytics in the targeted two-way campaigns, and campaign management. In light of the prevailing market scene whereby most corporations are disposed to share their CRM strategies, Sport Chek should first consider the level of competitiveness from other sportswear franchises in Canada and probably abroad to make sure their rivals cannot use the shared strategies to outwit the outlet and possibly most of their customers away from them.

Methods of Recruiting and Selection of Sales Force

Majority of organizations' CEOs concur with the fact that recruitment process is one of the fundamental recipes for a successful growth of a business. However, a successful recruitment process is a function of a range of factors including transparent systems that comprehensively evaluates the suitability of the job candidate. At the start of any of its recruitment, Sport Chek uses an applicant tracking system called Hodes iQ, where for the sales force, the company posts a sales vacancy and the applicants are linked to store manager's dashboards for suitability evaluation (Marketing N.p).

While all recruitments of the salespeople are done through the prescribed channels, the selection of the suitable candidate is done after vigorous evaluations some even through the non-formal avenues such as the social media platforms. Specifically, Sport Chek uses Linked-In profiles to view referrals and recommendation by their previous employers.

To test the sales associate's ability to engage with strangers, the company has established a method of online assessment based on psychometric testing that uses 50 to 150 questions to generate a profile of an individual person. The generated profile is judged with an established benchmark to select the best sales person to fill the vacancy. All these assessments culminate in a fit interview where the best candidate is selected for the job (Candidates & Schaeffer, 2018).

Sales Force Organisation

Salesforce organisation involves apportioning and management of sales capital to achieve marketing and sales' goals. The market segment in which the sports retailer operates, clients' location and their projections, the extent of the product range, and the number and skills of sales personnel are reflected in this organisation. Sport Chek's sales force organisation must be streamlined with the overall marketing strategy and mission of reaching out to clients in the remotest areas through a methodical presentation of the business's best brand names in addition to private brands that are identifiable with the retail outlet.

Moreover, organising the store's sales force by the sportswear market segment is key to ensuring that Sport Chek provides specialized products and services in the athletic domain. Focusing the company's product range in one sector will guarantee production and sale of premium quality items that will perhaps attract more customers while retaining the current clients' base. With most of Sport Chek's customers being Canadians, the retailer should allocate much of its resources to within the country, although certain areas such as Ontario and British Columbia can be allocated relatively more resources due to the huge market potential in these areas. For time-consuming sales activities, for instance, setting schedules with distant clients, Sport Chek can give its telemarketing team more capacity to conduct these duties. It is also important for the retailer's top management to collaborate with the marketing team in creating lead generation applications geared for enhancing predictions made by the sales force.

Methods of Training the Sales Force

To fully integrate into the company's organizational and operations culture, employee training becomes a very critical tool for this transition phase. Sports Chek is moving from the 1990s and early 2000s form of retail that was marked by mass retails inspired by the value-hungry consumer (Marketing N.p). Instead of leaving the higher level of service to smaller retail shops, Sports Chek has rolled up its sleeves and while it offers a wide range of products at affordable prices, the current times of online shopping forces one to distinguish themselves by creating a personalized experience that can only be provided by the well-trained sales force.

To keep up with the retail environment, Sport Chek has to train it sales people and this is usually done through regular national day training program that brings all the brand specialists and sales associates to get a train about product testing and information. For the technical expert salesperson, employees are taken to a master fit program that sharpens their technical skills to enable them to harness their knowledge for a successful sales process.

In addition to physical training, the sales force is taken through an online training that is specifically tailored to match the area of expertise one is designated.

Methods of Establishing Sales Force Size,...