Sales Management Matters

Ever tried to benchmark your sales organization’s performance? It’s not an easy or inexpensive proposition. Finding objective, credible data has usually meant commissioning research, or settling for an apples-to-oranges affair with poorly-matched data. Now SMA underwriter The TAS Group aims to change that with its new “Dealmaker Index,” a free tool that provides insight to both individuals and sales teams on sales performa ...

I recently had occasion to pick up an old copy of Spin Selling, still one of my favorites – which I’d recommend to Sales Management and Sales reps alike. Something caught my attention that I didn’t see the first time around -- fast sales cycles are not always the goal. Now, if you’ve been managing your team by providing KPIs around the timing or linearity of deals; your might take pause at a counter-intuitive idea such as this one.  

But it stands to ...

As we meet with potential clients to discuss their businesses, we frequently hear one or another variation of the following lament: "we've signed up a bunch of channel partners but they haven't sold a damn thing!" Unfortunately, this "sign them up and they will sell" mindset is the channel sales equivalent to the "build it and they will come" brand of wishful thinking. Typically it is easy to zero-in on the root cause: absence of "mindshare." ...

A recent conversation with a COO got us thinking. After meeting with a top CRM vendor our client said: “Did you hear the number of times and ways they referenced sales transformation? Since when did segmenting the business, re-designing the sales process, and enabling it with better tools become a major transformation? “Sales Transformation” has become the new “Re-engineering.” 

Certainly, there’s a lot of sound and fury out there about t ...

Our members are thinking hard about sales productivity. Some are scrambling to react to unexpected growth; others to cratering demand. Many are re-aligning sales organizations as markets around them change unpredictably.

They’re in turns exhilarated, terrified, or uncertain in the current eco ...

We hate conference bags. If you're attending SMA's 2011 Annual Conference, don't plan on getting one. Who wants to schlep stuff you didn't ask for in a bag you'll never use again?

Instead, our conference attendees get a P ...

SMA's Chairman Bob Kelly interviews Juan Herrera, Vice President CRM at SAP. The interview took place at this spring's excellent MIT Sloan Sales Conference. We'll be posting more interview video with transcripts over the next few days. 

AchieveGlobal recently completed a comprehensive research initiative on sales effectiveness. The research is impressive in its scope: more than 1,000 sales and sales management respondents. AchieveGlobal Product Manager Mark Fears and study author Mark Marone will deliver a webcast on the research next week for the ...

The marketing machine behind the latest mobile devices and technology solutions is pumping furiously, and sales organizations are not immune to the promises in the offing. bInstant connectivity, smartphones with thousands of applications at your fingertips—what’s not to like?

The real question, though, is not simply whether to go with iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or something else. The real question is, what are your organization’s needs? 

That& ...

“We keep promoting our best salespeople to be sales managers, but most of the time they don’t succeed in that role.”  

Ever hear this statement before? Or have you even said it yourself? It’s an extremely common refrain, to be sure, but why? The strategy of promoting your best sales talent to manage and develop other salespeople seems completely reasonable. Yet, the practice of doing so has an abysmally low rate of success … abysmally low ...

ES Research is researching virtual training practices, and is recruiting participants for a web-based survey. Participants receive a copy of the study findings, and some other nice freebies. The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete, and is open to sales reps, managers, corporate L&D, HR, sales ops, and sales enablement professionals. Participate in the survey her ...

Inside sales hiring and staffing is exploding. Sales Readiness Group's Norman Behar points out in a recent post on SRG's blog that inside sales is now "increasingly sophisticated and the preferred method of selling for many products and services that were traditionally sold by field based reps." He site ...

Sales Operations

Sales operations leaders typically set sales quota based on historical performance, and a rough estimate of expected incremental growth. More advanced approaches might also utilize some factored value from each person’s sales funnel. Add to these basic approaches a little bit of stretch goal (because we all know those sales guys are sandbagging us), and voila: sales quotas. It’s a disarmingly crude approach. 

But sales operations pr ...

“What makes a salesperson successful?” 

This simple but vexing question has been asked millions of times by thousands of sales leaders for more than a hundred years. Millions of salespeople also ponder this question as they search for ways to boost their own performance. So after all of our prolonged questioning, what do we collectively believe is the most probable correct answer? Motivation? Selling skills? Personality traits? Innate abilities? Experience? Al ...