The Sales VP Lament

Alan Scroope – March 24, 2010

The flip side of my previous blog is what’s going on in the Sales organization.  They’re under constant pressure to make the quarter, introduce new products, and meet other business development objectives set by the organization.  To them, seeing one more spreadsheet of excess, at-risk inventory that they have to sign up to is enough to make their eyes glaze over.  Yet they’ll take it on, knowing that it’s #25 on their Top Ten priority list, because they don’t want to risk product slipping onto the grey market.  They’d rather take the credibility hit for failing to move the excess than listen to their sales team regaling stories of channel corruption.

Then the Sales exec finds out what his counterpart in Supply Chain ended up selling the inventory for at liquidation.

Double whammy.  Besides failing to move the inventory as promised, the company’s bottom line performance took a hit with unnecessarily large reserves.  “If I had the tool and the flexibility on the ground rules that Supply Chain has I could have done way better.”   That’s the lament of the Sales VP.

Which is exactly why the two-tier platform run by many FreeFlow customers turns out to be a real win-win.  The Sales force gets a tool that lets their channel partners (or sales team if they want to keep it internal) a constantly updated view of product that is available for promotion to the channel.  The CFO is keeping an eye on sales and can adjust pricing as necessary.  And it’s only the residual inventory at the end of the period that ends up getting liquidated.

The Sales teams that have worked with a FreeFlow platform for promoting excess inventory to a safe, hand-picked, buying community are elated not only with the financial performance but with the minimum interference to the sales team.  No more email, spreadsheets, double-booking, price negotiation and exception approvals, the FreeFlow platform is always on and always up to date.

There will always be challenges to the credibility of the Sales organization, but excess inventory doesn’t have to be one of them.