Sales Management Matters

Join us at our next Sales Operations Effectiveness Workshop in Chicago on June 19 & 20. The workshop will focus on current sales productivity trends, using metrics to drive sales results, the impact of social media on sales operations, and lots more. Hosted by The Sales Management Association and DePaul University's Center for Sales Leadership, this two-day event will feature a series of short work ...

Take a moment to answer this question: How healthy is your sales pipeline at this very moment? What was the first idea that popped into your head? That’s right... The size of your pipeline. And your next step was probably to compare it to your overall quota. Three times quota? Four times quota? It’s the most classic measure of all, and it is founded on an assumption that has governed most sales forces since the beginning of the profession – Bigger is better. I have c ...

Salesperson/manager ride-alongs are common practice; we’d guess almost everyone reading this has participated in one, either from the driver’s seat, or as a shotgun-riding manager. We wondered: how do sales organizations get the most out of these interactions? We asked Catalytic Advisors’ Everett Hill to present a webcast on this topic on January 27th. His presentation offered ...

We've published a new Research Brief from the smart folks at Sales Economics in SMA's Resource Library. The paper poses the question, "Why do companies invest more in engineering how they buy stuff (i.e. their supply chains) than in engineering how they sell stuff?" The article then outlines a planning approach for developing an operations plan for the sales force. It's a thoughtful piece of work from Alejandro Erasso and Matthias Linnenkamp. Not a Sale ...

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 performance and productivity. Too often, these kin ...

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 reason, d ...

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." Pu ...

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 the need to ...

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 economic environment, but their focus on making salespeople more productive is remarkably c ...

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 Poken. Poken is a small device that enables our attendees, speakers, and exhibitors to connect with each other and exchange digital information with a ...

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 SMA community (the webcast is open to non members). We caught up with Fears and Marone to ask a few questions in advance of the webcast. [Join us Wednesday August ...

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’s a more co ...

“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 here. ...