Impact of customer calls consistency on sales with correlation between sales and its affecting variables

: ACI Pharma, the pharmaceutical wing of Advanced Chemical Industries (ACI) Limited, has faced a sales falling issue despite the remarkable promotional costs. The investigation has been done to find the association between the sales-affecting variables and sales. The required data have been collected from ACI Pharma. The proposed study uses sales and five influential variables, such as promotional cost, product knowledge, target customer coverage, random customer coverage, and call consistency, to investigate the expected association. Variables have considered the average performance of 634 salespeople from July to September 2023. Salesmen in the 80-100 cluster show more productivity and obedience than others. Product knowledge and promotional cost exhibit positive correlations with sales, but customer coverage numbers, either target or random, present a negative correlation with sales. The study only shows the direction of the relation between two variables rather than the mathematical impact of variables on sales. Future studies are required based on regression analysis for statistical inference of sales-affecting variables on sales. ACI Pharma is using the research output and benefiting. Other selling-based organizations suffering from similar problems may be beneficiaries of this study. The most significant value of the study is finding the role of call consistency in the sales performance of the sales reps.


Introduction
Advanced Chemical Industries (ACI) Limited is one of the largest conglomerates, a corporation of several related or unrelated businesses, in Bangladesh.Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a British multinational company, established a branch in East Pakistan.After its liberation in 1971, East Pakistan converted into a newly independent country named Bangladesh, and the ICI was renamed ICI Bangladesh Manufacturers Limited.Finally, in 1992, the ICI Bangladesh Manufacturers Limited was renamed ACI Limited (ACI Limited, 2023a).Now, the company is running its business in different countries on 4 continents.The ACI is a Bangladesh-originated multinational corporation running its 42 business activities throughout the globe (Manik, 2023a).The main objective of a sales-based profitable organization is selling its products to customers.Sale is a very complex and confounding function of many variables.The sales of an organization depend on lots of factors such as motivation of salesforce, product knowledge of salespeople, quality of product, customer coverage, number of calls to customer, call consistency, customer satisfaction, customer relationship management, marketing efforts, management skill, monitoring, strategic plan, the success rate of plan implementation, reputation of organization, post selling services, sales technology, and so on.
Each profitable corporation has a dedicated field force for selling its products to customers.The field force of the organization visits all potential customers to explain the benefits of its products.Product knowledge is the most important factor to explain the advantage of products over their competitors' products.The purchase decision of customers is positively influenced by product knowledge, flash sales, and in-home shopping tendency (Hertanto & Sulhaini, 2020).The perceived product knowledge of a product regulates the relationship between consumer perceptions of sales pressure and persuasion knowledge (Zboja, Brudvig, Laird, & Clark, 2021).The empirical evidence conceives the product knowledge of salespeople indirectly influences sales performance through the competitive intelligence behaviors of the salesforce (Mariadoss, Milewicz, Lee, & Sahaym, 2014).Both local knowledge and team knowledge are significant in developing and nurturing the new and existing sales leads and customer relationships (Singh et al., 2019).
The customer relationship management system and its four dimensions, such as system quality, information quality, system usage, and user satisfaction, have a positive and significant impact on the performance of the telecommunication industry in Jordan (Al-Weshah, Al-Manasrah, & Al-Qatawneh, 2019).Customer relationship management and organizational performance show a positive and significant relationship in the hotel industry, so management should practice customer relationship management to improve sales performance (Madhovi & Dhliwayo, 2017).According to big data analysis, organizational characteristics like management support, user involvement, and voluntariness, together with individual characteristics like self-efficiency, playfulness, and social norms, are positive indicators of the salesforce perception, and this perception finally hits sales performance via customer relationship management (Shahbaz et al., 2021).
Motivation is one of the psychological factors that affect the sales performance of a corporation.The salesforce of an organization is motivated by different motivational factors, such as work-life balance, financial sustainability of the organization, and freedom of selling, which finally hit the sales performance of an organization (Kotni & Karumuri, 2018).The motivation of employees has a strong and positive impact on organizational performance (Ferreira, 2017).Motivation is an inner drive of an individual that significantly depends on the leadership skills of supervisors.Transformational leadership has a positive effect on the empowerment and self-efficiency of the salesforce, and these skills of sales reps convert into organizational performance (Murphy & Anderson, 2020).The thought self-leadership of salespersons and the sales performance of an organization are positively related through the three process variables such as self-efficiency, selling skills, and adaptive selling behavior (Singh, Kumar, & Puri, 2017).Product portfolio scope, cross-functional cooperation of sales units, and customer-supplier relationships are involved in the sales performance of a firm (Panagopoulos, Rapp, & Ogilvie, 2017).Sales promotion has a positive and significant impact on organizational sales performance (Pembi, Fudamu, & Adamu, 2017).Corporate social responsibility, such as donation and sales revenue of a company, is positively correlated with sales (Nyame-Asiamah & Ghulam, 2020).
Distrust in sales representatives harms sales performance (Schmitz, Lee, Isenberg, & Lilien, 2022).However, the trust overestimation of salespersons also negatively impacts sales, and a unit increase in trust overestimation decreases financial revenue by $ 7.89 million (Mangus, Jones, Folse, & Sridhar, 2023).A quiet ego, such as positive psychological constructs like positive emotions, positively influences adaptive selling behaviors in customer interactions and indirectly increases sales performance (Gilbert, Krush, Trainor, & Wayment, 2022).Social media followers and website visitors positively affect the sales of a corporation (Cortez, Johnston, & Dastidar, 2023).
It is evident from the above literature that sale is a very complex function of so many factors.It is impossible to measure the accurate sales performance of salespeople with the help of four or five variables.However, salesmen of a company frequently meet with customers to sell its product benefits.Generally, in an organized corporation, sales reps make a monthly call plan before starting a specific month including target customer numbers, call time, and call materials.For example, in ACI Pharma, each salesperson completes their call plan for August 2023 between July 25-31, 2023.ACI Pharma has faced a sales declining problem, though the company has significant promotional activities.Maintaining call consistency according to the monthly call plan is very important to motivate the customer to purchase the product.The previous studies emphasize different sales influencing variables, but there is a lack of studies to assess the impact of call consistency on the sales performance of salesmen.This study has been designed to evaluate the effect of call consistency on the sales performance of salespeople and find the correlation between sales and sales influencing variables, for instance, product knowledge, promotional cost, and customer coverage.This study may help evaluate the importance of call consistency on the sales performance of salespeople of an organization.Further, this study might be viable to understand the correlation between sales and a set of sales managing variables.Any sellingbased organization may use this study to construct or reform its strategies to boost sales.

Research Method
The pharmaceutical business is one of the priority businesses of ACI Limited, though it has 42 businesses at present.ACI Pharma, the pharmaceutical wing of ACI Limited, is exporting its pharmaceutical goods to 30 countries on four continents and contributing to the health security of the world (ACI Limited, 2023b).The company is operating with a 3.2% to 4.1% market share in the pharmaceutical industry in Bangladesh (Manik, Sakib, & Ali, 2023).ACI Pharma has 3912 employees including a large sales force for promoting and selling its products to customers.The doctor is the primary customer of a pharmaceutical company as consumers purchase a drug based on the prescription provided by the doctor.ACI Pharma has seven sub-businesses named Neoronta, Symbiota, Synergy, Syntony, Syspero, Synapse, and Biotech with 3526 sales reps.This study has considered the sales reps of team Symbiota to evaluate the sales performance of salesmen in the light of the sales-affecting variables.The Symbiota team has 1123 sales reps in the country along with 64 drug brands with 171 stockkeeping units.Although the team Symbiota has 64 brands, most brands are seasonal or institutional sales-based.The team has five growth-driving brands that names are "Paricel, Cerox-CV, Gavilac, Cora-DX, and Gabarol".These five brands are leading contributors to the sales figures of the team Symbiota, and the maximum promotional cost is allocated for promoting these brands.Team management and sales force of the Symbiota design all activities-resource allocation, detailing, action plan, sales force exam, and marketing campaign-emphasizing these brands.
This study considers the following six variables to evaluate the sales performance of the salesforce of the team Symbiota.These variables consider the average performance of above mentioned five brands from July to September, 2023.
Avg. Sale-average net sale per salesman per brand per month.Avg.P.cost-average promotional cost allocated for promotional act per sales rep per brand per month.
Avg. Knowledge-Average obtained mark out of 30 in the monthly exam per salesman.It is product knowledge.
Avg. T.customer-Average target customer number visited per salesman per brand per month.Avg.R.customer-Average random customer number visited per salesman per brand per month.
Call consistency-Salespeople complete a call plan for each target customer for a specific month before starting the month.Call consistency is a measurement of the call performance of a brand according to the monthly plan.
Sales reps of ACI Pharma meet two types of customers, target and random.Target customers are the planned customers of a specific brand in a month fixed before starting the month.The list of target customers of a brand is fixed for three months.On the other hand, random customers are customers of a brand visited by sales reps without any plan.
The initial sample size of the study was 1123 salespeople of the Symbiota team.The team management exchanges the sales reps among different territories throughout the year to increase the sales figures.The study excludes the 271 sales reps from the initial sample to avoid the interchange effect of sales reps, so the reduced sample size was 852.Moreover, to eliminate the extreme value effect from the reduced sample size, the study considers the 2-sigma control limit of each variable, and the final sample size has been fixed at 634.This sample size has been divided into three clusters according to the call consistency level of the sales reps.The call consistency varies from 0 to 100.Call consistency 0 means there is a 100% deviation between the plan call and the done call, while consistency 100 means there is a 0% deviation between the plan call and the done call.The sales reps whose call consistency lies between 80 to 100, 60 to 79, and 20 to 59 are assigned to the 80-100 cluster, the 60-79 cluster, and the 20-59 cluster, respectively.The sales and promotional costs have been calculated according to Taka, the local currency of Bangladesh, which is denoted as TK.

Results and Discussion
Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of sales and other sales influential variables of the salesman whose call consistency lies from 80 to 100.There are 254, the highest among the three clusters, sales reps in the 80-100 cluster.The per capita per brand monthly sale of the group is TK 31,055, whereas the promotional cost is TK 3,697.The ratio of average sale and promotional cost is 31,055:3,697, which is equivalent to 8.4:1.0,indicating monthly per brand per capita sales revenue is TK 8.4 whereas promotional cost is TK 1.The mean exam mark of this group is 21 out of 30.This salesforce group covers 14 target customers per month per brand per person, whereas the random customer coverage number is 27.Descriptive statistics of sales and other sales-affecting variables of the sales force whose call consistency varies between 60-79 have been presented in Table 2.There are 245 sales reps in the 60-79 cluster.The per person per brand monthly sales and promotional costs ratio of this class is TK 29,828:3,918 meaning 7.6:1.0.The average obtained exam score in this class is 21 out of 30.On average, per brand per salesman month-wise, the target customer coverage number is 18, but the random customer coverage number is 35.Table 3 shows the descriptive statistics of sales and other sales managing variables of the salespeople whose call consistency varies from 20 to 59. Salespeople number in the 20-59 cluster is 135, the lowest among the three clusters.On average, per brand monthly per capita ratio of sales and promotional cost of this cluster is TK 28,503:3,851 equivalence to 7.4:1.0.The average earned exam mark is 20 out of 30.Monthly, per capita per brand, the mean target customer coverage number is 18, while the random customer coverage number is 38.According to the guideline of Symbiota team management, sales reps should fix 15 target customers for a brand in a territory.On the other side, sales reps have the right to cover other random customers as they are primarily responsible for sales target achievement in their territories.For TK 1.0 investment, the average promotional cost, return-average sales-is TK 8.4, TK 7.6, and TK 7.4 for the 80-100, 60-79, and 20-59 clusters, respectively.Salesmen falling in the 80-100 cluster show the highest productivity as their Return on Investment (ROI) is the highest among the three clusters.Furthermore, only this cluster follows the target customer guideline of team management means sales reps who follow the management guidelines show better sales performance than those who do not follow the instructions.The proper sales strategy implementation by the salesforce has a positive impact on the sales performance of an organization (Inyang & Jaramillo, 2020).Moreover, the average random customer coverage number is the lowest for the 80-100 cluster among the three clusters.Sales reps in the 80-100 cluster are very focused on the target customer rather than the random customer.The standard Deviation (SD) and Coefficient of Variation (CV) of average sales are lower for the 80-100 cluster than the 60-79 and 20-59 clusters meaning the sale performance of the 80-100 cluster is more centralized than the other two clusters.The pharmaceutical industry in Bangladesh is highly competitive due to approximately 200 active manufacturers and sellers (Manik, 2023b).The study claims that sales reps should focus on target customers rather than random customers to achieve higher productivity in a highly competitive market.
Table 4 indicates the correlation of variables for salespeople lying in the 80-100 cluster.The diagonal elements reveal the correlation between the same variables.For example, the correlation between sale to sale, promotional cost to promotional cost, and knowledge to knowledge has been presented in diagonal elements, and these values must be 1.0.The off-diagonal components show the correlation between two different variables.For instance, the correlation between sale and promotional cost, sale and knowledge, and sale and customer coverage are shown in off-diagonal elements.Values of off-diagonal elements must lie from -1.0 to 1.0, where -1.0 indicates the perfect negative correlation, and 1.0 shows the perfect positive correlation.The correlation between the average sale and the average promotional cost is 0.262, and the average sale and average knowledge is 0.249 means the sales will increase if promotional cost and knowledge increase.The correlation analysis of sales managing variables of the sales reps belonging to the 60-79 cluster has been presented in Table 5.The correlation between average sales and average target customer coverage number is -0.123, so there is a negative impact of average target customer coverage number on average sales performance means the sales may decrease if the number of target customer coverage increases.In a competitive market, management should focus on a fixed set of target customer numbers rather than more customer coverage.6 represents the correlation between sales and different sales-effecting variables of the salesforce whose call consistency lies between 20-59.The correlation between the average knowledge level and the average promotional cost is 0.216 meaning there is a positive correlation between knowledge and promo cost for the 20-59 cluster.Knowledge and target customer coverage numbers are positively correlated as the correlation between them is 0.243, whereas knowledge and random customer coverage indicate a correlation of 0.101 meaning the knowledgeable reps focus more on the target customer than the random customer.Sales and profits are the primary focus of a profit-making organization.According to correlation analysis in Table 4-6, promotional cost and knowledge reveal a positive correlation with sales in all cases, so team management should emphasize promotional and learning activities to boost sales.Promotional activities, such as medical education sponsorship and drug samples, positively impacted sales performance (Rm & Sivakumaran, 2023).The relationship between sales performance and adaptive selling behavior significantly relies on the product knowledge of sellers (Charoensukmongkol & Suthatorn, 2021).On the other hand, according to Table 4-6, the customer coverage number, either target or random, exhibits a negative correlation with sales.The company should reduce the average customer coverage number to increase sales.Customer coverage is essential to boost sales, but more customer coverage may decentralize the focus and promotional activities of the salesforce in a competitive market, and the shallow activities of sales reps may negatively impact sales.In a highly competitive market, a company must emphasize target customers with frequent calls to capture the customer.Furthermore, random customer coverage numbers should be reduced to raise the focus on target customers in highly competitive markets, which may help to boost sales performance.
According to this study, promotional cost and knowledge are positively correlated with sales, but customer coverage is negatively correlated.In all groups, sales reps conceive a vague concept that more customer coverage may ensure more sales.By understanding this erratic concept of the sales reps, the management of the team Symbiota has already developed a benchmark regarding the target customer set, 15 per territory for a brand, but reps do not follow this guideline in most cases due to the psychological impact of the benefit of more customer coverage.
The management of ACI Pharma falls into a problem regarding sales declining despite significant promotional costs.The marketing and sales departments of the company have arranged several meetings regarding the sales declining issue.As an employee of ACI Pharma, the author has proposed a study on team Symbiota.The study suggests team management should concentrate on a fixed, 8-12 per territory, number of potential target customers coverage for each brand based on proper customer profiling rather than random customer coverage.Additionally, the management of the company should develop new strategies to maintain call consistency between 80-100 and spend promotional costs on some specific target customers with frequent calls to take the customers' mind share from competitors.Additionally, management should train its sales force to deploy their knowledge and activities on some specific target customers to grasp the customers' minds.ACI Pharma has launched a new incentive policy to maintain the call consistency between 80-100 and fix target customer numbers between 8-10 in a territory for each brand in the light of this research, and the company is enjoying higher sales performance than previously it does.Other organizations suffering from similar problems may use this study.

Conclusion
ACI Pharma faced a sales declining issue despite remarkable promotional costs.The study identifies five sales-affecting variables, such as promotional cost, product knowledge of salespeople, target customer coverage, random customer coverage, and call consistency, and tries to associate them with sales.Among seven teams of ACI Pharma, this study has selected the Symbiota team as an experiment.Although there are 1123 reps in the team, the reduced sample size is 634 after eliminating the transfer of salespeople and the extreme value effect.This sample size has been divided into three clusters based on call consistency.Per capita per brand monthly investment and return ratio is TK 1.0: 8.4 for the 80-100 cluster, TK 1.0: 7.6 for the 60-79 cluster, and TK 1.0: 7.4 for the 20-59 cluster.Salespeople in the 80-100 group are comparatively more productive and obedient than the others.Promotional cost and knowledge show a positive correlation with sales.However, the customer coverage number exhibits a negative correlation with sales performance.
Customer coverage is necessary to increase sales, but more customer coverage may negatively impact sales performance in a competitive market.The management of ACI Pharma should revise the existing policy to fix 8 to 10 potential target customers for each brand in the territory.Call frequency to target customers should be increased to take mind share from the competitors' brands.Moreover, the company should emphasize the call consistency.Additionally, policymakers of the company should train its salespeople to increase promotional activities focusing on the target customers rather than the random customers.
This study only finds the direction of the relationship between the two sales-related variables.The article is unable to quantify the impact of sales-affecting variables on sales.However, further study is required to recover this limitation based on regression analysis to make a statistical inference of each sale influential variable on sale.Here, sales influencing variables indicate a poor association with sales as it is a complex function of many variables, so future studies might be conducted to incorporate more sales-affecting variables.Moreover, only the three-month average has been considered to find the correlation between the two variables in this study, but the averaging period might be 6 to 12 months for a better understanding of the impact of sales managing variables on sales.

Table 4 .
Correlation of the sales affecting variables of the 80-100 cluster.

Table 5 .
Correlation of the sales affecting variables of the 60-79 cluster.

Table 6 .
Correlation of the sales affecting variables of the 20-59 cluster.