Persuasive Memo

TO: Harri Karvinen, President FROM: Saurabh Mishra, Regional Manager of Sales DATE: 19th July, 2009 SUBJECT: Review of proposal to eliminate STP On behalf of all the regional sales managers and the salespersons in TeknoSport, I would like to put forth this request to kindly review the pending decision to eliminate the legendary TeknoSport’s Sales training programme(STP). Being part of the business for a long time, and from the rich ground work experience that we all believe we have, we feel that STP has been at the forefront of pitching TeknoSport into a position that it enjoys right now. STP has been an integral part of the success story of TeknoSport and there are various reasons for which there is a need to continue the STP. They are enlisted below: †¢Rigorous training before on-the-job training – STP takes the new employees through a rigorous 5 day schedule, adapting them to the skills which differentiates an STP salespersons from the rest †¢Holistic training – STP incorporates the accumulated learning of various salespersons over so many years. This would not be provided by a buddy system where scope is limited to just one mentor †¢Training of long time sales personnel – Currently, there are no programs in place which would train the long time sales personnel with the new products, new methodology and new communication systems in place. This is very crucial for our successful salespersons to adapt to the changing paradigm †¢Employee Satisfaction – STP is one of the major contributors to employee satisfaction in our firm. It provides an enriching experience to the long time sales persons, and to the new employees, it imparts new confidence levels and makes them feel important to TeknoSport. Apart from that, it helps them learn the new communications systems, thus enabling them in better workload management, making them more efficient †¢Contribution to success – Our success has been driven by amazing performances by our sales personnel. Our innovative products are definitely important, however, if not for the amazing skills and knowledge shown by our sales personnel trained in STP, none of our products would see even their first customers †¢Employee Retention – STP has been the biggest factor in reducing employee turnover in our company. If we need to maintain the same, we need to continue STP, as it is undoubtedly the biggest favorite amongst all our employees and has lready proved to be the single most important contributor to reducing employee turnover Instead of completely eliminating STP, we can think of other alternatives, for example †¢Combining STP with the suggested buddy program †¢Shortening the duration of STP †¢Providing STP to certain percentage of sales personnel and then spreading the learning through buddy system †¢Making it biannually instead of quarterly To cut a long story short, we believe that STP has been at the heart of TeknoSport’s success story. Our USP is our superior, highly knowledgeable team of Sales Personnel, which are being churned out by STP year after year. Elimination of STP would compromise the quality of our sales personnel as well as their satisfaction levels and this is bound to have a major impact on our market position. Even though STP requires investment on the part of the company, these investments provide unparalleled long term benefits both in terms of our success as well as employee satisfaction. To cut down STP would be to cut down the driving force behind our success. We earnestly request you to kindly review the proposal of eliminating STP in light of the arguments purported by us and to look into the alternatives. Attachments – Employee ratings of STP, market survey, customer survey