Resources

Sales operations functions serve a vital, strategic role in sales organizations – as change agents. Increasingly, sales organizations must restructure deployment models, rethink selling roles and messages, and wring greater efficiency out of existing resources. Sales operations departments are uniquely positioned to drive these efforts. But supporting strategic sales changes...Read more

Many sales forces grew large and successful with a hands-off approach -- one that might have included hiring good salespeople, putting them on commission plans, handing them a phone book and turning them loose. If they were good, they made lots of money. If not, they starved themselves out of...Read more

Over the past two decades, technology-driven innovation has profoundly changed selling and sales organizations. PCs and smart mobile devices are now essential selling tools; CRM platforms are virtually ubiquitous; and new applications appear daily to help automate, enhance, or speed up how salespeople sell. This research examines how business-to-business firms...Read more

Technology is transforming how sales organizations sell, but also how they're managed. Among technology's greatest potential management benefits relates to coaching salespeople -- an activity under-prioritized and poorly supported in most firms. This webcast explores multiple technologies that amplify, automate, and enhance management's coaching efforts. Our expert panel will present...Read more

In many companies, proposals are not effective as they could be. In some, proposals may actually turn business away. For a variety of reasons, sales organizations often overlook the importance of well crafted, effectively presented proposals. As a result, a vital sales tool goes under optimized. In this webcast we...Read more

Enlightened sales organizations invest in salesperson "onboarding" - a structured effort to speed new salespeople up the learning curve. As our recent research shows, successful onboarding dramatically impacts salesperson productivity and new hire success rates. A newly emerging idea attempts to leverage this approach for veteran salespeople too. Called "re-boarding,"...Read more

Accurately assessing opportunity is an essential competency for sales organizations. It underpins critical resource allocation decisions, such as how and where to deploy salespeople, and it determines how essential work is prioritized within the sales force. Opportunity assessment involves a continuum of activities, from identifying and qualifying leads, to sizing...Read more

Sales organizations demand a daunting breadth of planning expertise: from prioritizing high-level objectives to align with firm strategy, to allocating limited resources to adequately cover opportunities, to establishing tactical performance goals at multiple levels within the organization, and, along the way, coordinating input from many corporate functions, on behalf of...Read more