Resources

Sales planning is often tactically focused, addressing challenges like forecasting, goal setting, or incentive design. But many sales organizations consider their planning efforts ineffective, due to misaligned objectives, inadequate data, and late deliverables. High performing sales forces are benefitting from new approaches to sales planning. These firms are integrating planning...Read more

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Sales organizations are seeing incremental productivity gains from AI adoption. While significant to be sure, these impacts mostly fall short of the disruption suggested by AI’s unrelenting hype. Except when it comes to sales training. AI enabled training offers the most compelling and demonstrably value-creating application of AI for most...Read more

Sales organizations often change in response to shifting market conditions, competitive pressure, or shifts in demand or buyer preferences. Sometimes those changes rise to the level of “transformational” change, involving wholesale restructuring or strategic realignments of selling resources. In this panel, senior sales and sales operations leaders discuss their experiences...Read more

Many sales organizations use a combination of inside and outside salespeople, but struggle to determine the optimal mix of the two. New academic research helps address this challenge. Using data from 194 firms and a review of current practices, researchers examined the relationship between the use of inside sales roles...Read more

Changing the sales compensation plan is fraught with peril. Poorly thought out changes can tank morale, erode productivity, and trigger salesperson turnover. A recent Sales Management Association research reveals that firms with the most amount of sales comp program change are least likely to have effective sales compensation programs - suggesting...Read more

Sales organizations consider coaching an important management role and a critical driver of sales force effectiveness, but few firms effectively coach salespeople. Many fail to elevate coaching among competing manager priorities, while others deliver training, performance feedback, or training, rather than true coaching. This webcast focuses on skills coaching. It...Read more

Firms expect a lot from their sales compensation programs. They design sales comp plans to motivate and direct salespeople, to attract and retain top performing talent, and to produce sales results aligned with business objectives and strategy. But the sales comp plan's effectiveness isn't always self-evident. How do managers gauge...Read more