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& sales operations.

Webcast

May 16, 2012

New research shows that few companies are focusing on sales territory optimization. Yet intelligent territory design yields substantial productivity improvements - as much as 10% in a single year - to those firms who embrace it. Optimizing account assignments, territory design, and sales resource deployment might be the single highest-return investment sales operations departments can make in sales productivity.

In this SMA webcast Mapping Analytics' Cindy Reid reviews prevailing territory management practices, identifies approaches that yield the best results, and offers insights into how sales organizations can implement optimal territory design to make sakes forces more efficient and productive.

Presenter: Cindy Reid, Chief Operating Officer, Mapping Analytics

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Webcast

May 06, 2012

iPads are portable, compelling, and cost-effective, and they are having no small impact on the sales organization. More powerful than smart phones, and more mobile than laptops, iPads have an additional benefit uniquely suited to sales: they are consummately social devices. That is, they offer an easily share-able user experience. Unobtrusive and intuitive to use, iPads are starting and sustaining sales interactions, and delivering information to mobile sales professionals in new ways.

In the scramble to deploy iPads, many questions remain regarding their use within the sales function. In this SMA webcast, we examine the sales force’s use of iPads from several perspectives, and articulate sales leadership’s priorities in making the most of this new tool. Drawing upon research recently conducted by SMA, the session will also detail key trends in iPad usage. Topics covered include:

• The promise of tablet computing
• Sales-specific applications: an overview
• Killer applications
• Management’s priorities
• Quick hit ideas for optimizing iPad’s sales impact

Speakers:

Bob Kelly, Chairman, The Sales Management Association
Cliff Alper and Tim Knox, Analysis Factory
Paula Crerar, Director of Content Marketing, Brainshark

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Webcast

April 13, 2012

Dave Hoffmeister, Executive in Residence at the DePaul Center for Sales Leadership, provides a research briefing on the important characteristics of high performance sales organizations recently identified in the Center's biennial Sales Effectiveness Survey. Conducted over a six-month period among over 3,000 firms in the US, the results of this survey indicate that only a few key organizational and operational behaviors are needed to drive high performance. Key areas such as talent, coaching, motivation, and development – combined with sales competencies, process and technology – drive superior results

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Webcast

April 05, 2012

Increased competition is among the toughest challenges facing sales organizations today. As pricing pressure mounts and customer budgets shrink, sales leaders must bring a new level of innovation to their efforts to beat the competition.

In this webinar, AchieveGlobal’s Greg McDonald and Colleen O’Sullivan illustrate how best-in-class companies practice a strategic process in competitive situations to close more deals and drive revenue growth. Together they will share AchieveGlobal’s research on the competitive landscape – examining proven approaches to help salespeople succeed in the face of rising pressures against competition.

Topics include:

• How the economy has altered the competitive landscape
• What to do to leverage this landscape in order to beat an incumbent
• Implementing a simple two-step process to overcome the challenges of competition: “assess and apply”
• Applying resources to learn more about your customers and competitors  

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Research Brief

April 03, 2012

Competition remains one of the most pressing challenges facing sales organizations. And perhaps more concerning, competition is increasing versus years past. In fact, 85 percent of global executives surveyed by McKinsey & Company describe their business environment as more competitive than it was five years ago, largely because of the improved capabilities of their competitors and growth in the number of low-cost competitors. In this paper, AchieveGlobal takes a fresh look at competitive challenges facing sales organization, and reveals new strategies for competitive success.

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Research Brief

March 29, 2012

There are many different types of interactions that take place between sellers and managers, but there is one particular meeting that stands out as near-universal among business-to-business sales forces: the sales pipeline review meeting. During this discussion, the rep and manager go through individual opportunities in varying degrees of detail in order to: 1) Get the manager comfortably knowledgeable about the salesperson's pipeline, and 2) Provide an opportunity for the manager to coach the rep to higher performance. In many sales forces, these are the primary coaching venues between the manager and seller.

If there is a single, persistent theme that is woven into all of these pipeline meetings, it would be the firm belief by management that a bigger sales pipeline is a better sales pipeline. However, pumping more and more deals into a pipeline can actually work against the seller by filling the pipeline with junk. Junk that will bounce around for months on end, wasting the time of the seller and their organization.
This paper outlines a framework for approaching pipeline health that is both holistic and quantifiable, and focused on true pipeline health, rather than heft.

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Academic Research

March 23, 2012

In this paper, the authors discuss the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) systems in complex and simple selling settings and examine how CRM is implemented in both contexts. Specifically, they suggest that CRM strategies can be implemented from the top-down, originating from top management decisions, or from the bottom-up, stemming from the knowledge and experience of the frontline salespeople. After discussing the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, the authors develop a CRM continuum using bottom-up and top-down CRM strategies as end points. Finally, the authors offer concrete propositions and research initiatives for future investigation.

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Webcast

March 22, 2012

Is your sales team prepared to execute on your 2012 strategy? Strategy execution across a large sales organization requires tight alignment across six dimensions, including:

• Strategy: Linking sales strategy to business strategy, and
• Talent: Equipping sales leaders and professionals with strategy specific selling skills

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Research Brief

March 08, 2012

Trying to recover ground lost during the recession, many sales organizations are pursuing traditional tactics to increase revenues. They are putting more “feet on the street” and raising quotas or even doing both. They’re hoping that more quota or “demand” will result in more revenue or “supply” but that’s a big risk if you simply have more people chasing static demand. When more sales reps and bigger quotas don’t work you are left with higher costs, which eat into margin and make the situation worse, not better. Author: Beagle Research 

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Research Brief

March 05, 2012

Executives and senior managers leading transformation initiatives in sales operations need a way to assess the current state of their organizations. The concept of operations maturity constitutes a useful framework for this. The leaders of consulting firm Sales Economics, Inc. explain the meaning of maturity and capability in practice, the pros and cons of using various maturity models to assess current states, and offer a simple and effective assessment

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