Sales Management Matters

Sales Management Association's Chairman Bob Kelly interviews Juan Herrera, Vice President CRM at SAP. The interview took place at this spring's excellent MIT Sloan Sales Conference. We'll be posting more interview video with transcripts over the next few days. {transcription}

AchieveGlobal recently completed a comprehensive research initiative on sales effectiveness. The research is impressive in its scope: more than 1,000 sales and sales management respondents. AchieveGlobal Product Manager Mark Fears and study author Mark Marone will deliver a webcast on the research next week for the Sales Management Association community (the webcast...Read more

The marketing machine behind the latest mobile devices and technology solutions is pumping furiously, and sales organizations are not immune to the promises in the offing. bInstant connectivity, smartphones with thousands of applications at your fingertips—what’s not to like The real question, though, is not simply whether to go with...Read more

“We keep promoting our best salespeople to be sales managers, but most of the time they don’t succeed in that role.”   Ever hear this statement before? Or have you even said it yourself? It’s an extremely common refrain, to be sure, but why? The strategy of promoting your best sales...Read more

ES Research is researching virtual training practices, and is recruiting participants for a web-based survey. Participants receive a copy of the study findings, and some other nice freebies. The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete, and is open to sales reps, managers, corporate L&D, HR, sales ops, and sales...Read more

Inside sales hiring and staffing is exploding. Sales Readiness Group's Norman Behar points out in a recent post on SRG's blog that inside sales is now "increasingly sophisticated and the preferred method of selling for many products and services that were traditionally sold by field based reps." He sites a...Read more

Sales Operations Sales operations leaders typically set sales quota based on historical performance, and a rough estimate of expected incremental growth. More advanced approaches might also utilize some factored value from each person’s sales funnel. Add to these basic approaches a little bit of stretch goal (because we all know...Read more

“What makes a salesperson successful?”  This simple but vexing question has been asked millions of times by thousands of sales leaders for more than a hundred years. Millions of salespeople also ponder this question as they search for ways to boost their own performance. So after all of our prolonged...Read more