Erin Allison

Marketing Management MKT 4300

4/12/18

StepSmart Fitness Case Analysis

1. What are the problems in StepSmart’s New England district? What are the key decisions
Cooper will have to make in his role as a district manager?
StepSmart fitness is currently seeing underperformance from the New England district. Mark
Wallace, the new CEO of StepSmart as of six months ago, decided to hire on a previous
employee Ben Cooper as the new sales director of the New England district. The New England
district was not able to achieve specific targets as well as the other districts. Major issues with
the New England district’s performance was that the sales growth from 2009 to 2010 was 7%
while the overall regional growth was 9.8%. Going from 2010 to 2011 the sales growth for the
nation was 12.3% and the New England’s district dropped to about 5.9% growth.
StepSmart’s U.S. sales for 2011 totaled to be $630 million. The company totaled 540 people and
the company’s sales force was organized into three groups including retail products, private and
institutional, and commercial products.

2. What factors should be considered when evaluating each salesperson’s performance? What
performance measures should be used when evaluating each salesperson’s performance?
Cooper spent the end of the summer touring the district and meeting with each salesperson for
two days. Cooper compiled a list describing his thoughts on 7 sales people, along with the brief
notes his predecessor left behind.
Each of the sales people had their different approaches for sales and opinions on handling the
sales situations. Cooper noticed that most of the individuals needed some form of professional
guidance, and even thought that some of them needed probation. The case study ends and tells
Cooper creating a presentation with slides for recommendations for probation and termination,
hiring: costs and benefits, suggestions for increasing productivity, and improving salesperson
evaluation methods.
Daniel Ellis can be considered the best salespersons out of the seven that Cooper shadowed.
Ellis’ previous notes on his file show that he has always been a good worker and has even
declined managerial roles within the company. Ellis had seen higher total commercial sales in
2011 than his peers according to Exhibit 3. Exhibit 4 shows that Ellis saw 21% of the district sales
in 2012 and 20% of the district sales in 2013.
Given the information collected from Cooper, it would be beneficial to create a standard
evaluating method in order to evaluate each salesperson and possibly even consider a training
refresher seminar or work outing paired with a follow up evaluation of each salesperson in the
later months after the training. Each of the workers seem to have their own idea of what they
can and cannot do or should and should not do and all of the sales persons need to be on the
 same page, especially when they have such a large gap between their top seller and lowest
seller.

3. Who is Cooper’s biggest problem? What can/should he do about it?

Ben Cooper’s current problem has to do with accepting the new job as a sales director for the
New England district for StepSmart. The New England district was facing significant challenges as
the sales from the district were far below the targeted revenue estimated last year. The CEO
Mark Wallace informed Cooper that the underperformance was because of the poor sales force
team and Cooper was expected to help improve it.

4. What should Cooper do, as he takes over the district, to address these problems?
Cooper definitely needs to address the problems of the frontline employees that he is taking
over. As we can see from Cooper’s days shadowing these sales people, they can be a problem
with the districts suffering. Cooper needs to go forth with creating a list of those who may be on
“probation” and take time to learn more about the company, and maybe even spend more time
shadowing the high performing sales people such as Ellis. Ellis is growing in age and will not be
able to hold the district sales forever, but has the opportunity to share his knowledge of the
industry with Cooper or his peers which can benefit the entire region. As previously mentioned,
I also think Cooper needs to consider a retraining exercise of some sort for those who are
underperforming or abusing expense allowances, etc. Another option if this does not work will
be to hire more sales people. I would not consider reassigning regions as it seems that most of
the sales people enjoy the region that they are placed.