Resources

Competition remains one of the most pressing challenges facing sales organizations. And perhaps more concerning, competition is increasing versus years past. In fact, 85 percent of global executives surveyed by McKinsey & Company describe their business environment as more competitive than it was five years ago, largely because of the...Read more

There are many different types of interactions that take place between sellers and managers, but there is one particular meeting that stands out as near-universal among business-to-business sales forces: the sales pipeline review meeting. During this discussion, the rep and manager go through individual opportunities in varying degrees of detail...Read more

In this paper, the authors discuss the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) systems in complex and simple selling settings and examine how CRM is implemented in both contexts. Specifically, they suggest that CRM strategies can be implemented from the top-down, originating from top management decisions, or from the bottom-up, stemming from the...Read more

Is your sales team prepared to execute on your 2012 strategy? Strategy execution across a large sales organization requires tight alignment across six dimensions, including: Strategy: Linking sales strategy to business strategy, and Talent: Equipping sales leaders and professionals with strategy specific selling skills Strategy and Talent, while important, are...Read more

Trying to recover ground lost during the recession, many sales organizations are pursuing traditional tactics to increase revenues. They are putting more “feet on the street” and raising quotas or even doing both. They’re hoping that more quota or “demand” will result in more revenue or “supply” but that’s a big risk if...Read more

The Price Waterfall is a great tool for understanding the effect of pricing and discounting – but it’s only a starting point. It is of limited value if it is not preceded and accompanied by efforts directed at the other influences on the pricing operation. Properly linking the Price Waterfall to them is...Read more

Executives and senior managers leading transformation initiatives in sales operations need a way to assess the current state of their organizations. The concept of operations maturity constitutes a useful framework for this. The leaders of consulting firm Sales Economics, Inc. explain the meaning of maturity and capability in practice, the pros and cons of...Read more

Sports teams use playbooks to organize the complex set of activities needed to execute a game plan, providing a practical instruction guide for coaches and players alike. Now sales managers are adopting the “playbook” concept for constructing sales process guides. They’re finding that sales playbooks provide a helpful framework for...Read more