Stepsmart Fitness Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Stepsmart Fitness Case Study Solution

Coopers Efforts

Mr.Cooper must take the following steps to turnaround the decreasing regional sales.

A training session must be conducted for all the employees including those who have outperformed, to share their success stories and strategies to motivate and guide the others.
He must Terminate Avery due to his low performance. The buying power of his territory was 0.94 whereas the buying power of 2011 after his efforts were only 0.36%. This shows that he underperformed by 62% (Exhibit 1).
Concetta and Barow must be put on probation as they underperformed 57% and 40% respectively in their regions.

Alternatives

Alternative 1

Cooper has been given the authority to fire the employee or put him on probation if their performances are not up to the mark. Cooper decided to spend 2 days with each employee in order to evaluate them properly and then make a decision. He learned about their background and their style of work. Cooper didn’t wanted to fire anyone as they have served a long period in this organization and he was also a strong follower of organizational ethics. He although had no issues in putting them on probation. Flowing could be done to improve the sales and productivity.

Concetta and Barrow should be put on probation due to the following reasons:
- Poor performance on buying power index (Exhibit 1)

- They have relatively high expense cost (Exhibit 3)

- Along with this, Barrow also has a behavior of resisting coaching, training and amending her sales approach, while Concetta has poor performance on after sale services and follow up.

Further Avery should be terminated, as she is the lowest performer in terms of generating sales and lacks determination and motivation.Moreover, she is allocated the biggest land area but is still unable to generate leads.

Alternative 2

Second alternative can be to increase the overall productivity by providing professional level training to his sales teams. The training must cover the following areas, Work ethics, Pitching and generating new leads, Retaining customers, Updated product knowledge, and Performance measures. A positive effect would be created by this training session and will help Cooper achieve 100% of his territory sales target.

Alternative 3

Third alternative can be to focus on developing realistic performance measures. One measure that can be used to set target for every sales agent is BPI. Although, it should not be the only metric used for measuring any employee performances. Some other metrics that can be used along with BPI are Client Acquisition Rate, Existing Client Engagement, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Upsell Rate.

Recommendation

Keeping the alternatives in mind, Cooper should rather focus on developing a strategy instead of going for one option. Starting with the short decisions, he needs to evaluate who hire and fire, and who to put on probation. Since all these actions will have costs associated with them.Terminating Avery would definitely come up with a cost, but it’s better than losing productivity. While in long run decisions, Cooper should focus on developing new performance measures as suggested in alternative 3. Realistic targets have to be set so employee’s performance cane be fairly judged. Finally, he should focus on training his employees in the areas mentioned in alternative 2, since improvement in these areas would automatically improve overall performance.

Moreover, cooper need to decide whether to hire new people or not. It could be seen that Avery was in charge of a large territory which he was unable to manage. Results may have been different if the same area was divided between two salesperson. It could have boosted the sales in territory, but again, this too will have some additional cost. It would be better to do a cost benefit analysis before taking this step. In fact, it would be even better if the existing salesperson are trained instead of hiring a new ones.