Waters Chromatography Division:

Effectiveness of various selling tasks

Analysis By
Aditya Nagrare (2014PGP453) | Akshay Kohade (2014PGP024) | Anantha Ranganathan (2014PGP035) | Kapil Kanungo (2011IPM038)|
K. Karunakar Reddy (2014PGP161) | Prakash Ramchiary (2014PGP257) | Ruthrakumar U (2014PGP313) | Saurav Maitra (2014PGP336)

 Value proposition of Waters: Technical expertise combined with a strong customer support.
The company differentiated themselves by employing expert chemists with experience in
HPLC instead of typical sales reps for selling their products
They felt that salespeople with technical background are better equipped to sell the solutions
to problems and a technical background is needed to deal with customers problems
Moreover the competitive hires were only productive over the short term so the company
reverted back to their original policy of using expert chromatographers for field sales in 1980s
A typical salesperson with 2-3 three years of lab experience managed 2 to 100 accounts in
1984
The various selling tasks that the salesrep was involved in are: Direct selling, cold calling and
personal calls

Waters and the Sales Representative

Direct Selling:
Ray Burnett spent around 25-30% of his time on direct selling
He managed the remaining time between customer service and seminars
He planned and allocated his calls based on the percentage of business represented by
each account

Effectiveness:
Ray concentrated more on his existing customer base as 20% of his existing accounts
generated 80% of his territorys total business

Direct Selling and its effectiveness

Cold Calling:
Ray also allocated some time to develop new business by cold calling prospective customers
Spent around 2.25 hours for calling new customers daily
He visited the companies that were along his route and discussed the respective R&D or
quality control labs
He would explain the potential applications for HPLC in their labs and would get a sample for
a trial run at Waters laboratory
Effectiveness:
Though cold calling was a good way of getting new customers, Ray found little time to
pursue all of them due to a lack of time
This usually resulted in missing out on several prospective customers

Cold calling and its effectiveness

 Personal Calls/Direct visits:

Spent around 2:30 hours daily and visited the customers in person
Effectiveness:
The aim of Waters is to create new market for their HPLC products. However this was made
difficult as the salespeople had to spend a lot of time with customers and sell solutions to their
problems
For example there were some issues with the incentive program as it encouraged a Sell and
Run attitude and was against the core value proposition of Waters which is to service the
customers well
The company has to make a tradeoff between personalized attention to customers and
creating new markets. Both cant be done at the same time

Personal Calls & effectiveness of various selling tasks

Personal Calls & effectiveness of various selling tasks