CASE STUDY

Optimizing Field Sales Management Span of Control​​

A major national distributor of beverages with a Direct Store Delivery (DSD) model experienced rapid expansion across multiple regions. As the company grew, it faced challenges in maintaining effective management structures and ensuring front-line managers could adequately support their sales teams.

OVERVIEW

Industry
Food & Beverage
Wholesale & Distribution
Client
National Beverage Distributor
Location
North America
Services
Work Measurement (Time & Motion Studies)
Workload Analysis
Organizational Design (Job Design)
Challenge
Unstructured expansion led to management inefficiencies and strained frontline teams.
Approach
Assessed management structure, workload, and process optimization opportunities.
Recommendation
Standardizing control, streamlining tasks, and adding support roles improved leadership.
Results
Restructured management enhanced sales support, leadership effectiveness, and growth readiness.

THE STORY

The Challenge

The distributor’s growth did not follow the traditional local-to-regional-to-national pattern. Instead, expansion was driven by market needs, resulting in a patchwork of small branches and limited regional scale. This led to inconsistent management spans, overextended front-line managers, and under-supported sales teams, ultimately impacting operational efficiency and service quality.

Our Apppoach

PS Solutions Group was engaged to assess and optimize the company’s management span of control. The project included:
  • Analyzing current manager-to-sales representative ratios and comparing them to industry benchmarks.
  • Conducting qualitative and quantitative workload assessments to understand the demands on front-line managers.
  • Reviewing job design and identifying non-value-added tasks that could be eliminated or reassigned.
  • Evaluating organizational context, including geography, team capabilities, and management workload.

Our Recommendations

The assessment revealed that front-line managers were burdened with a wide range of responsibilities, limiting their ability to lead, coach, and develop their teams. Ratios of managers to sales reps varied widely, often based on anecdotal decisions rather than data.

​Recommendations included standardizing span of control based on workload analysis, streamlining administrative tasks, and investing in support roles to allow managers to focus on high-value leadership activities.

The Results

The company received a clear, actionable roadmap for restructuring management layers and optimizing span of control. ​By aligning manager responsibilities and ratios with best practices, the distributor improved support for its sales force, enhanced leadership effectiveness, and positioned itself for scalable, sustainable growth.