Roles and Responsibilities of the Principal and Limited Risk Sales Units “Company X” Case Study

This research is a case study at an undisclosed company, referred to as company X throughout the entirety of the paper. The research is about the corporate principal structure operating model and answers the question; What are the roles and responsibilities of the principal sales units and the limited risk sales units within this company X? Primarily all of the research was done in a qualitive matter via interview with professionals working in a company that use this business model. Two interviews were conducted. One interview was held with a process owner whose job it was to implement the principal structure throughout the company that they worked for. This interviewee was chosen due to their wide variety of theoretical knowledge of how this operating model is designed to run. The second interview was conducted with a sales planner that works within one of the company’s sales units. This interviewee was chosen as they have worked many roles within the sales unit and had a wide scale of first-hand knowledge of what are the roles of the sales units. The theory of this thesis consists of 3 major sections. The first section attempts to define what the corporate principal structure is. In short, the corporate principal structure is a business operating model that uses a management model, and a decision-making model, designed to streamline the processes that happen within the company. The next section is about the reasons for using such a model. And the last section is about how a company chose the principal sales unit. The results of the interviews defined the roles of both the principal sales units and the limited risk sales units within company X. They concluded that the four main roles of the principal sales units are the company sales strategy, setting sales targets, defining pricing and assortment, and lastly rules for customer acceptance. They then went on to define the roles of the limited risk sales units. The roles of these sales units are calculating their customer profitability and selling, general and administrative expense, the creation of sales leads and target setting implementation, sales planning, and efficiently executing sales