Sales Management Matters

You probably know what it is, but do you know why the Cloud matters to your sales organization? The Cloud has changed how buyers buy, how employees work, and how sellers go to market. Everything is faster. There is an expectation of instant gratification. With this shift, the way we...Read more

Sales management considers performance reporting essential, and sales managers are often the loudest constituents served by sales operations departments. But our recent research suggests that salespeople, not their managers, may be a more important “customer” for performance reporting. Our study’s 85 participating business-to-business firms rated the amount of time their...Read more

Once upon a time there was a little red hen who lived in a big sales organization. She had three fluffy yellow chicks. One morning as they were busily scratching about the yard, looking for something to eat, the little red hen found a prospect. “Look!” she said. “See what...Read more

Last year TinderBox, Miller Heiman, and the Sales Management Association conducted research on sales proposal effectiveness. Drawing on input from 76 participating business-to-business sales organizations, findings show that proposal effectiveness correlates closely with sales growth, but that several facets of proposal management remain under-optimized. These include making proposal easier for...Read more

What makes a great sales dashboard? It’s more than just clever visual design or the latest technology. In fact, sales reporting standards are evolving quickly with innovations in data accessibility, technology, and analytics. We’re hoping to capture a few new insights into business-to-business sales organizations’ reporting practices through our latest...Read more

Several weeks ago we held our first Google Hangout – a discussion on Sales Leadership’s Social Strategy. The discussion featured Richardson’s CEO David DiStefano and Gerry Moran, SAP’s Head of Social Media, North America. We’d hoped also to include a speaker from InsideView, who couldn’t join because of technical issues...Read more

It’s sales kickoff meeting season, the time when companies reveal strategy and marching orders to their sales forces. Kickoff meetings set the tone for the entire year, so there’s a lot riding on getting them right. To help you out, we’ve put together a toolkit with some sales kickoff meeting-related...Read more

Later this winter I’ll present with several leading marketing academics on the topic “Personal Selling and Sales Management in Emerging Markets: A Research Agenda” at the 2014 American Marketing Association’s Winter Marketing Educators’ Conference. I’m looking for perspective on which aspects of this issue might be most important to the...Read more