The Management Of The Sales Force In The Key Account To The Sales Companies In China: The Problems And The Solutions

Following the development of the selling channel of a company,especially following the coming out of the key accounts'to the selling companies (KA) and the change of the selling environment, the management of the sales force has also been developing continuously. They have brought out the sales force in KA .while many companies in our country can not connect the management of this group with the strategy of it's development, so many problems came out and had blocked the companies'development to some distance.The coming out of the sales force in KA has great relationship with the personal selling in the middle east. As to the development of the economics and the change of the environment, the selling channel of a company and personal selling have both fluxed. So bringing out the study of the sales force by the western scholars . And the most typical of them are Agency theory, Organization theory and the Transaction Cost Analysis theory. The Agency theory focus on the uncertainty of the environment ,as the Organization theory on the job itself of the sales force, and the Transaction Cost Analysis theory , the function of the market.As the opinion of the Agency theory, when the uncertainty of the environment is high, the manager should choose the outcome-based control, on the contrary, using the behavior-based or the outcome-based control. What the most contribution of the Organization theory is that it put forward the analysis of the job of the sales force which is the quite correct beginning of the human resources management. And it also found out that when the Task Programmability and the Outcome Observability are both low, the manager should not use behavior-based or the outcome-based control, but the clan control. That is to say a humanity-based control way should be brought out. What the Transaction Cost Analysis theory focus on is the function of the market, it said, the market would pick out the behavior doing good to the outcome of the sales. While the unfit one would be eliminated. But it still acknowledged that when the sales force has gotten the TSA(Transaction specific Assets),the manager should not just let the market to manage them, he should use behavior-based control.We can find out that there are three factors mentioned mostly in these three theories, the selling environment, the job itself and the characters of the sales force. And what we can learn from those theories and the concrete evidence researches is that in a company we may not just use a single control way. The above theories and the outcome of them have done great favor to the managers of companies. And our country's scholars have also done many researches about the sales force .But we can not find out many studies about the sales force management in the KA, what we can find and most scholars have done can not form a system yet. That is mostly because the high level managers of the companies in china are not giving great attention to it. Of cause the quality of the sales force themselves and the developing degree of the economics matter much.As to the problems of the management of the sales force in KA, just like the uncertainty of the managing right, the high draw- away rate of the sales force, be lack of the scientific managing system of the sales person and so on, the most important cause is that the manager of the company has not taken it account to the strategy of the company. And the outcome will be serious. What can we do in facing all of these problems? Just because the natural relationship between the sales force in KA and the development of the personal selling in the middle east, we would try to use the result of the researches of the western scholars about the sales force managing ways on the basis of our country real situation.We hope that sales force in KA will get their correct status and do what they should do to the society in the near future.