We must analyse our sales profile for the stationery business stream within Hothouse.  This will be reviewed in terms of the management of our sales team, uor customer base, website effectiveness, and an analysis of our most successful product lines.  There will be several areas where data collection must take place in order for this analysis to be effective.  

Forename	Surname	Responsibility	
Christine	Pollard	Sales Manager	
Christopher	Smith	Shop	
Ian	Smith	Telephone sales	
Jamal 	Khan	Website	
Patrick 	O'Keefe	Website	
Tereza	Bartoska	Website	
Roberto 	Trapionni	Stock Control	

Some of this sales team have been long established within the company; Christine the Sales manager has been with Hothouse for fifteen years and Christopher has just competed his twenty seventh year.  The other members of the team have all been employed within the last two years, three of them within the last nine months.

Our customer base contains many regular clients.  It has grown significantly over the past two years.  We have several customers who frequently purchase a large quantity of office supplies.  The largest of these are:

•	Bettabuy
•	University of Tawara Beach
•	Dudley
•	Papermite
•	Dygitell

The website has increased both the number of clients and the volume of business dramatically in recent months.  There is still a feeling amongst senior managers that the website is not as professional in both design and operation as it should be.  In order to improve this we are currently looking at amending the corporate house style of the website.  One suggestion for styles has been to use the colour schemes and fonts applied to our paper based stationery, an example of these styles is located below.  Please note that the spellings in this excerpt are correct and should not be amended.  This will be explained in more detail to the board of directors when they see this document.  Here is an excerpt from the proposed stylesheet:

p	{color: #ff00ff; font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: 10px}
li	{color: #00bfff; font-family: times, “times new roman”; font-size: smaller}
h1	{color: #000000; font-family: times, “times new roman”; font-size: largest}

Some data that may be useful is a snapshot of a single day’s trading.  This data has been collected and presented in both tabular and graphical form.  The table of data below shows the sum of the number of individual items sold per employee and the count of the number of individual transactions:

The number of individual transactions per employee can also been seen graphically:

The effectiveness of the current website must also be reviewed.  Although it has been running for four years now, the website has had three different styles and four different organisations hosting the service.  The quality of service that we are currently obtaining is very expensive yet little better than the previous companies.  There is a need to cost out hosting our own server and internet service.  This would mean a large initial capital outlay and the on-costs of employing someone with suitable expertise in web hosting.  There would also be the overheads relating to ISDN or equivalent communications systems.  Some of the costs of this enterprise may be offset through selling web space and web services to other companies.  This of course would not include our direct competitors.  The increased efficiency of a system like this would help to address several of the areas of concern that were expressed by our customers in the recent customer survey sent to them.  In order to look at this more closely, senior management have employed an external consultant who is due to submit his report to the board of directors on the 23rd of next month. 

The current sales team consists of 6 staff.  They deal with all aspects of the sales, including face-to-face contact with customers, telephone sales and increasingly internet based orders.  Those people currently employed are: