Process mapping is a critical skill for the effective sales manager. Essential to the effort of managing sales processes for consistency, quality, and through-put, sales process mapping provides a common vision and shared language for improving business results.
Thomas N. Ingram, Raymond W. LaForge, and Charles H. Schwepker, Jr. Enhancing the moral behavior of salespeople is increasingly important, but dif cult, in today’s fast-paced and complex selling environment. Sales organizations need to emphasize ethical codes of conduct, but must also address the potential impact of all sales management...Read more
Hiring the right people is one of the most important tasks that managers have. When it comes to hiring salespeople, the stakes are particularly high. A great hire can make a critical difference both in terms of revenues and the morale of a sales force. A hiring mistake is costly...Read more
Management Tool
Tom Knight Axiom Consulting Partners Sales forces find it more difficult than ever to get their message heard in a cluttered and competitive marketplace. In the consumer packaged goods industry alone, 60,000 new products were introduced to grocery store buyers since 2000 – each with presentation materials that average 16...Read more
Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer This paper presents a Sales Force Effectiveness Framework that organizes the complexities of sales organizations, providing a holistic approach to de ning and assessing sales force effectiveness. Sales practitioners can use the framework to diagnose sales force issues and develop multidimensional...Read more
Dawn R. Deeter-Schmelz, Daniel J. Goebel, and Karen Norman Kennedy This study builds on previous research concerning sales manager selection by examining the characteristics of effective sales managers from two perspectives—that of sales managers and sales representatives. Results of this exploratory study indicate that sales representatives assess the effectiveness of...Read more
Dennis B. Arnett and Vishag Badrinarayanan Managing relationships with customers is often challenging because firms engage in many different types of transactions and their customers vary considerably as to their wants and needs. To meet these challenges, firms are turning increasingly to formal customer relationship management (CRM) programs. Because of...Read more
Research
Sales Technology Orientation, Information Effectiveness, and Sales Performance
11 June 2008
Gary K. Hunter and William D. Perreault Jr. Sales managers need a practical means for evaluating returns from investments in sales technology implementations (including sales automation and sales-based customer relationship management systems). This research proposes a behavioral process model approach that can be applied to evaluate sales technology implementations. We...Read more
