Sales Management Matters

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 ...

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 ...

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- ...