Sales Management Matters

Jason Jordan is Vice President and Partner at Vantage Point Performance, and the author of Cracking the Sales Management Code, and contributed this guest post. I was recently speaking at the American Society for Training and Development’s international conference, and I happened into a conversation that yielded a very interesting...Read more

“Mobile Sales Enablement” is emerging as an important topic for our audience, judging by the response to several recent webcasts. Mutual Mobile‘s Sam Gaddis and Mike Nowlin’s presentation “Mobile Sales Enablement: What Sales Operations Needs to Know” offered a succinct business case and a summary of benefits for mobile enablement initiatives...Read more

Our recent webcast Building a Winning Sales Management Team: The Force Behind the Force, featured two perspectives on first line sales manager effectiveness. ZS Associates, whose intellectual Godfathers Sinha and Zoltners recently published an eponymous book on this topic, have much to say about sales effectiveness generally, and have focused...Read more

Marketers and technologists may be slow to admit this, but great conversations are important to B2B selling. Not in the euphemistic, marketing-speak context of a blog post’s comment thread, or an invitation to “join the conversation” by filling out a web-enabled registration form. We’re talking about honest-to-God conversations, where humans...Read more

Each quarter the Sales Management Association publishes a scholarly research article from The Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, the most important academic journal wholly focused in sales. In the future, we plan on featuring these articles – and other academic research work – with content that “translates” research...Read more

Symmetrics Group’s Michael Perla recently joined us on a webcast to review findings from our research Annual Sales Meetings – Best Practices in Preparation and Planning. Conducted in collaboration with Symmetrics Group, the research examines how large organizations plan effective annual sales meetings. It includes input from 51 business-to-business sales...Read more

CallidusCloud’s Chris Lesar offered several ideas for improving proposal effectiveness on our recent webcast Optimizing Sales Proposals and Quoting. Lesar frames the discussion by suggesting fouressential elements in a CPQ (Configure, Price, and Quotation) process: Product Selection Proposals Negotiations and Approvals Order Fulfillment Each element poses significant challenges, including delivering...Read more

We recently completed fascinating research on corporate training and development programs for sales managers. In a recent webcast (Research Update: Developing Sales Managers), research underwriter Business Efficacy’s Kurt Theriault joined me for a preliminary review of the study findings. The research show that firms spend less, per-person, on sales manager...Read more