Reengineering initiatives at many companies that cut administrative support have brought an unintended side effect, particularly for sales staff, according to Jim Dickie, a partner in the Boulder, Colo., sales and marketing excellence benchmarking firm Insight Technology Group.

"The goal is to cut costs and boost efficiency, which is admirable," Dickie explains. "But often the end result is simply shifting a burden from a $30,000-a-year administrative worker to a $200,000-a-year sales professional. Every hour that professional has to spend booking travel plans and doing clerical work is an hour taken away from his or her primary responsibility, which is generating revenue for the company."

At John H. Harland Company, it was not a case of administrative support for salespeople falling victim to misdirected cost-cutting efforts. Rather, the support had simply been lacking all along. "It was a huge need, one of those glaring gaps we had in our company, and we knew we had to do something," says Mike Brewington, vice president of sales for the Atlanta-based company. "The work was being done by the salespeople themselves or by a very small group of administrative support people. We were not able to supply a quick turnaround to internal or external customers."

Harland's business is supplying checks and other printed materials to financial institutions and their customers. It involves a type of selling that Brewington describes as very relationship-oriented. However, with a large, geographically diverse sales force - much of it operating from home offices with little, if any, administrative support - Harland's salespeople were spending too much time on non-selling activities.

Brewington believes there are two basic types of salespeople. The first type spends all their normal work hours trying to generate sales, and then devotes additional hours to catching up on administrative work. The unreasonably long workdays that result are a major cause of professional burnout. The second type makes a decision to devote a set number of hours to work each day, so time required for administrative chores is time not spent selling. The negative impact of lack of administrative support is obvious in both cases.

When the decision was made to increase administrative support for the sales force, Harland recognized that it didn't have the resources in-house to provide it. The support would have to be supplied from a centralized location and would rely heavily on technology.

"We really felt that based on the skill set and deliverables we were looking for, this was an excellent opportunity to outsource," Brewington explains. "We wanted a workforce that would be dedicated to our needs 100 percent of the time. We wanted the flexibility to quickly add help when we need it for special projects, such as a mass mailing. Since Harland does not count these things among our core competencies, we decided to find a partner that does."

Spherion, with a long history of providing companies with productivity-enhancing administrative support, was awarded the contract and now provides services in three areas: a sales resource center that provides word processing, graphics, dictation transcription and sales presentation drafts; a sales supply group that maintains sales collateral materials, monitoring inventory levels, making sure materials are kept timely and fulfilling online requests for materials placed by Harland salespeople; and a branch fulfillment center that provides both generic and customized collateral to Harland's customers.

The results, Brewington says, have been outstanding. "I think it would be conservative to say that we have seen at least a 25 percent increase in face time for salespeople as a result of this outsourcing initiative. We have probably captured back a day a week of selling time," he says. "Vile can link increases in customer satisfaction to this because of the increased presence of Harland people at their facilities. With new sales opportunities, a big part of the process is doing a thorough needs assessment, which requires being inside the organization, so we are also getting an important benefit there."