Sales Management Matters

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.  ...

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 practitioners rarely ...

Sizing the Sales Force View more presentations from The SMA Sales Management Association Is your sales force the right size? That’s a question many CxOs ask this time of year at the approach of the budgeting and planning season. On Tuesday of this week Axtria's Charlie Thompson will lead a webcast presentation on sales force sizing. Here are two slides from the presentation that will give you an idea of the frameworks he'll use in addressing this perennial leadershi ...

Everything, Including the Kitchen Sink In today’s computer-enabled workforce, information technology has become as integral to a world-class sales effort as are great products and superior salespeople. Customer relationship management, sales force automation, Internet sites, communication platforms, and other applications are now the mission-critical infrastructure that links buyers to sellers and sellers to their mother ship. However, we have all seen the sobering data on the l ...

To understand the key changes and new trends in line-of-business sales, I’ve had plenty of interesting discussions with sales managers at different levels in the past year. It’s clear from these conversations that revenue, profit, and reliable forecasts are still the top KPIs for measuring the success of sales executives. They may even be job- ...

Matrix Partners' David Skok recently presented at Boston's Lean Startup Circle on "Building a Sales and Marketing Machine." His insights, captured in this blog post and this SlideShare presentation deck, focus on customer acquisition, and utilize mostly B2C web-based business examples. But the larger insights apply to B2B sales organizations involved in complex, multi-face ...

Which sales management decisions have the most immediate impact on productivity? For our money, it’s sales deployment, or how and where to deploy sales resources. Sales deployment decisions include what kind of sellers to use (hunters, farmers, specialists, etc.), how many to deploy, where to put them, and what specific customer or opportunity assignments to giv ...

Sales Management Association underwriter The TAS Group advises clients on Sales Performance Automation – a “salesperson centric approach to increasing revenue, improving sales forecasts and metrics, and continually reinforcing best practices.” SPA uses technology to enable sales methodology, and deliver just-in-time training to salespeople when it matters the most – at the point in the sales process when skill acquisition is most contextually relevant. Compan ...

A sick compensation plan is often the harbinger of much bigger problems with sales organization effectiveness. Diagnose the the comp plan problem quickly enough, and you stand a chance of heading off disaster. Frequent SMA contributor Scott Sands details how effective diagnostics keep productive sales organizations clear of danger, while maintaining alignment between business objectives, sales organiza ...

We’re updating a research effort that met with lots of interest last year. The research explores key challenges and priorities of Sales Operations departments. Developed by SMA’s Sales Operations Advisory Board, we presented last year’s results at The Conference Board’s Sales Operations Leadership Conference (with help from our Advisory Board member Price Burlington from SAP). We&r ...