Sales Management Matters

Salesperson/manager ride-alongs are common practice; we’d guess almost everyone reading this has participated in one, either from the driver’s seat, or as a shotgun-riding manager. We wondered: how do sales organizations get the most out of these interactions? We asked Catalytic Advisors’ Everett Hill to present a webcast on this...Read more

We've published a new Research Brief from the smart folks at Sales Economics in the Sales Management Association's Resource Library. The paper poses the question, "Why do companies invest more in engineering how they buy stuff (i.e. their supply chains) than in engineering how they sell stuff?" The article then...Read more

Ever tried to benchmark your sales organization’s performance? It’s not an easy or inexpensive proposition. Finding objective, credible data has usually meant commissioning research, or settling for an apples-to-oranges affair with poorly-matched data. Now Sales Management Association underwriter The TAS Group aims to change that with its new “Dealmaker Index,”...Read more

I recently had occasion to pick up an old copy of Spin Selling, still one of my favorites – which I’d recommend to Sales Management and Sales reps alike. Something caught my attention that I didn’t see the first time around — fast sales cycles are not always the goal....Read more

As we meet with potential clients to discuss their businesses, we frequently hear one or another variation of the following lament: "we've signed up a bunch of channel partners but they haven't sold a damn thing!" Unfortunately, this "sign them up and they will sell" mindset is the channel sales...Read more

A recent conversation with a COO got us thinking. After meeting with a top CRM vendor our client said: “Did you hear the number of times and ways they referenced sales transformation? Since when did segmenting the business, re-designing the sales process, and enabling it with better tools become a...Read more

Our members are thinking hard about sales productivity. Some are scrambling to react to unexpected growth; others to cratering demand. Many are re-aligning sales organizations as markets around them change unpredictably. They’re in turns exhilarated, terrified, or uncertain in the current economic environment, but their focus on making salespeople more...Read more

We hate conference bags. If you're attending Sales Management Associations 's 2011 Annual Conference, don't plan on getting one. Who wants to schlep stuff you didn't ask for in a bag you'll never use again Instead, our conference attendees get a Poken. Poken is a small device that enables our...Read more