Gathering Solutions
My company is a liquor, wine, and a beer distributor. My job, as a sales representative is to sell all the programs possible and sell as many cases as I can. All the managers, category managers, and chain managers help me in every possible way to accomplish my goals. Every month, I am given a quota number to hit and my manager always follows up on that. So, everything is related to the sales numbers.
After I talked to 5 colleagues, I found out that the main stressor comes from the wineries in California. Wineries provide us with the best deals and programs they can and we are supposed to implement on it. If our sales numbers are not up from last year or consistent, we are in the danger of losing that brand and they might go with our competitors. Anytime in the year, the winery can come up with some very special deals for a limited time and we have to make sure we sell it. Most of the times, the managers said that they are not given enough notice and it gets hard to get those programs together and get an urgent meeting scheduled with the sales team. It’s like that you are supposed to leave everything else, and just get on to that job. It was felt amongst everyone that if there is proper planning in place and enough notice is given, we could do a much better job in selling all the program. One of the colleagues felt that certain people could ease the stress by not over reacting too quickly to a situation. They need to think about what they are going to say rather than taking snap decisions.
Communication was the other source of stressor. All my colleagues argued back and forth that people