FROM: Tony Tsao, Helsinki Regional Sales Manager
SUBJECT: Innovative Initiatives in Communications and Training
DATE: 8/2/2006
As the Regional Sales Manager for Helsinki, I really enjoy working with my team to bring our products to the customers. Feedback from the four stores in Helsinki indicates the customers love our innovations such as the cardiac monitors. I believe our ability to innovate is one of our greatest strengths. This is exactly why I am happy to learn about your plan to innovate our internal processes.
I am in full support of your initiatives focusing resources to developing new products and improving communications. Better product development would set us further apart from the competition, while enhanced communication integrates the company more. Allocating extra resources in these areas is the building block to our future success. However, like you said resource distribution is always difficult because the extra budget has to come from somewhere. I understand you are pressed to eliminate the Sales Training Program (STP) for the initiative, but there may be a better way.
I had a discussion with my fellow Regional Sales Managers. We would like to propose keeping the STP and innovate it to deliver superior training results at fractional costs. You may be curious or even suspicious as to why we should keep it and how this could be done; in fact, it is really simple. We should keep STP because it is part of our culture and eliminating entirely would have devastating effects on staff morale. Furthermore, the general consensus on STP is that it is very valuable, however expensive. Therefore, a plan that can better deliver STP with lower costs would benefit all of us, while keeping STP alive. This plan is one that closely ties with your product and communication innovations.
By improving our communications with networking and multimedia technology, we can transform our existing STP from face-to-face to