I would appreciate it if someone with a legal mind could help me with the following scenario and the questions that follow. Thank you very much.


Two weeks into your new and exciting responsibilities of national sales manager, you are beginning to lose your good feelings. This change of spirit results from hearing about various activities among your sales personnel. First, you learn one of your new sales representatives has been visiting with a competitor’s salesperson about each focusing on particular customers while agreeing not to call on the other’s customers. Second, a district manager reports that a large, extremely valuable, customer is asking for a pricing structure that is more favorable than prices offered to any other customer. The district manager expressed concern that your company may lose this customer’s business.

What legal worries do you have about each of these situations?

What type of information should a training/education program for your sales force include?

What are the ramifications if you decide to ignore these situations as you try to return to your “happy” state of mind?

excon

Hello Odessa:

Frankly, these are not legal consideration, they're business. There are NO legal ramifications except what happens if you go broke.

1) Training and education should teach salesmanship - which is lacking here, and good training should include being able to price your product so you keep your customers. That also is not evident here, although it might be a management problem rather than a training issue.

2) What are the ramifications of ignorance? You go broke.

excon

LisaB4657

Back up a sec, Excon. There are legal ramifications but they are somewhat remote, which leads me to the conclusion that this is yet again a homework problem.

With regard to the first issue, the question is raised as to whether the company has a large percentage of market share nationally and whether the competitor does as well. If the two companies together represent a monopoly in that field then there is the possibility that the companies can be sued for violation of federal antitrust laws.

The second issue isn't too bad. As long as there are no contracts between the company and other customers guaranteeing the lowest price offered, then there shouldn't be a legal problem in offering a lower price to a good customer.

I'll leave the training/education issue to the original poster to research so they can complete their homework.

ScottGem

The key here was the wording "Two weeks into your new and exciting responsibilities of national sales manager". That marks this as a homework question.

That brings these guidelines into play.
http://www.askmehelpdesk.com/arts-li...elp-board.html

But Lisa is right. There are laws about anti-trust activites, restraint of trade, and kickbacks. The OP needs to do her own homework about researching how these laws apply in her "scenario".

If she wants our help in the future she should do that research FIRST and then ask for our confirmation about what was found out.