Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 1, 2012

On the other hand, most businesses are operating with traditional models of salesperson recruitment and training. 15 billion is spent per year on sales training. Given the importance of skills and capabilities to sales performance, businesses need to reconsider who they recruit into sales roles, and how they train them.

Sales 18

Sales Sales Recruitment Sales Management 18

LSA Global

APRIL 24, 2017

To succeed, sales teams need to think less about their own sales process and products and more about their customer’s buying process and most pressing challenges. This requires a major change in the way salespeople operate. To have a truly effective sales team, you need a truly effective sales manager.

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Sales Sales Sales Management Operations 28

Harvard Business Review

JULY 10, 2012

One place they need to look is in their own sales organizations. In writing the book Sales Growth , we've found that CEOs who put sales management at the heart of their agenda have captured astonishing growth — outstripping their peers by 50 to 80 percent in terms of revenue and profitability. That's a big mistake.

Sales 17

Sales Sales Revenue Operations 17

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 1, 2014

A healthcare industry sales executive recently told us that as part of a continued effort to cut costs, her company had reduced the number of first-line sales managers from 66 down to 30 over a period of several years. sales forces is 10-12 salespeople per manager, but there is wide variation around this average.

Sales Management 9

Sales Management Sales Sales Manager 9

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 29, 2014

According to “Spin Selling” author Neil Rackham, when Xerox first established a sales operations group in the 1970s to take on activities such as sales planning, compensation, forecasting, and territory design, group leader J. •Evaluate sales force strategies, plans, goals, and objectives.

Sales 14

Sales Sales Compensation Diversity 14

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 31, 2016

For many executives battling through economic headwinds in emerging markets, the answer tends to be wherever they think someone will provide the strongest boost to top-line growth, which usually means hiring an additional sales or marketing manager to support the commercial front lines. Somewhere else?

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Sales Sales Marketing Sales Management 13

Harvard Business Review

JULY 30, 2018

Based on research for my book Sales Ex Machina: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing the World of Selling , here are five specific areas where AI algorithms can be leveraged to help your business grow by helping your sales team sell more: Price Optimization: Knowing what discount, if any, to give a client is always a tricky situation.

Sales 14

Sales Sales Revenue Sales Management 14

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 20, 2015

What separates high-performing sales organizations from average and underperforming sales organizations? In order to answer this question, I recently conducted an extensive 42-part survey with 786 sales professionals. High-performing sales organizations employ a more structured sales process.

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Sales Sales Revenue Sales Management 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 22, 2017

So how can you improve your sales skills, especially if you don’t pitch people often? And what should you do if you lose a sale? “Many of them tell me that sales is something they never want to do in their careers.” ” And yet, he says, “Sales is the most fundamental skill.”

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Sales Sales Banking Marketing 22

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 25, 2014

Digital channels have upended the well-trod ruts of sales and marketing organizations — already, nearly a third of all B2B purchases are done digitally. All of this increased complexity means sales leaders must rethink how they source leads, manage pipelines, and sell more effectively. They measure sales ROI differently.

Sales 15

Sales Sales ROI Marketing 15

Harvard Business Review

JULY 16, 2012

Somehow, "successful" sales training has become associated with a thick binder of material the salesperson lugs home from the class (never to open again). In this article we review four critical elements that are commonly missing from today's sales training programs.Take a look at your own sales training program to determine whether: 1.

Sales 15

Sales Sales Education Sales Management 15

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 30, 2017

Success in a sales force requires having strong talent up and down the organization. A weak salesperson will weaken a sales territory, a bad sales manager will damage their team and dampen results in their region, and a poor sales leader will eventually ruin the entire sales force. Consider two examples.

Sales 15

Sales Sales Compensation Sales Management 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 20, 2016

In sales, where charisma and extroversion can be advantages, some people attribute success more to inborn personality traits than to skills that can be coached or taught. ”) But there’s a big difference between individual success in sales and success across an entire sales force. .”) Organization.

Sales 14

Sales Sales Compensation Operations 14

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 9, 2012

You've heard the pitch: "You now have a huge volume, variety, and velocity of customer data, sales transaction data, competitive data, and sales activity data. It's not that simple, especially for sales forces. The history of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems holds valuable lessons. It's not about big data.

Sales 15

Sales Sales Sales Management Banking 15

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 9, 2014

Companies have long developed and managed their sales people differently from other employees, placing great emphasis on individual performance. Even in sales, network performance now accounts for about 44% of the impact. On the most effective sales teams, particularly B2B, the individual no longer reigns supreme.

Sales 14

Sales Sales Compensation Compliance 14

Harvard Business Review

MAY 25, 2016

Sales reps are most effective when they have the right amount of support staff, but exactly how much support staff does a company need, and how should it be structured? Call it a Goldilocks quandary: Too little support, and your sales people can’t do their jobs well; too much, and you’re wasting money.

Sales 14

Sales Sales ROI Administration 14

Chief Executive

AUGUST 8, 2022

In our experience, EPM enables managers to produce 10-30% year-on-year sustainable profit increases. The goals of a local regional sales manager, an SBU head, the CEO, shareholders, investors and others differ in fundamental ways. Whose profits are optimized. A related critical question is: Whose net profits are to be maximized?

Revenue 52

Revenue Implementation Advertising Marketing 52

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 22, 2018

Across the technology industry, subscription sales models are growing in popularity. The trend is having a big impact on sales forces. As ongoing account management activities consumed more and more sales time, new customer acquisition slowed down–and the company’s revenue growth began slowing, too.

Sales 14

Sales Sales Account Management Accounts 14

Harvard Business Review

JULY 6, 2012

Do the best salespeople make the best sales managers? Almost unanimously, when we ask sales leaders this question, the answer is "no." Yet paradoxically, and too often, sales leaders look for candidates among the sales ranks and select the best salesperson for the manager job.

Sales Management 16

Sales Management Sales Sales Administration 16

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 18, 2015

I recently conducted a research project involving nearly 800 salespeople and sales leaders to better answer this question. While dominance is commonly associated with brute force, this is not the case in sales. Sales management impact. Does a salesperson’s manager play a determining factor in achieving success?

Sales Management 15

Sales Management Sales Sales Accounts 15

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 13, 2015

One of the big challenges for the people leading global sales organizations is figuring out the right way to set pay for for salespeople who work in vastly different countries and markets. Some argue that having a single global plan for each sales role (e.g. Some argue that having a single global plan for each sales role (e.g.

Sales 12

Sales Sales Compensation Administration 12

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 15, 2011

We saw dramatic evidence of this in a study conducted by our sister program, CLC Compensation , which looked at sales comp. Sales reps place significantly greater importance on pay communications from their direct manager than from any other source (for example, HR, sales leadership, or sales operations).

Compensation 15

Compensation Sales Sales Sales Management 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 16, 2012

In 2005, HP split off the printer business from the personal computer business, dissolved the Customer Solutions Group (CSG) which was a sales and marketing organization that cut across product categories, and pushed selling responsibilities down to the product business units. Sales is full of such double-edged swords. Unreasonably so.

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Sales Sales Sales Management Benefits 9

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 15, 2011

A recent post by fellow HBR blogger Gill Corkindale illustrates how dysfunctional or outdated organizational designs can make it difficult for managers to operate effectively. But many times strategies evolve and change while seasoned managers clutch tightly to their old ways of structuring their units and organizing their teams.

Reorganization 15

Reorganization Hospitality Sales Sales 15

Harvard Business Review

JULY 31, 2012

Sophisticated sales organizations now have the ability to combine, sift, and sort vast troves of data to develop highly efficient strategies for selling into micromarkets. In fact, we've found that micromarket strategy is perhaps the most potent new application of big-data analytics in B2B sales. Align sales coverage with opportunity.

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Sales Sales B2B B2C 15

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 10, 2016

The trend is heating up the sales field as well, enabling entirely new ways of selling. For example, AI applications can take over the time-consuming tasks of initiating contact with a sales lead and then qualifying, following up, and sustaining the lead. Operations in a Connected World. Insight Center. Sponsored by Accenture.

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Sales Sales Sales Management Operations 14

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 4, 2017

It’s common for leaders of sales teams to focus almost exclusively on short-term tactics and current operations while failing to think and act in a way that supports the longer-term needs of their businesses — and it’s hard to fault them. This danger is prevalent in sales. Denver Post/Getty Images.

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Sales Sales Recruitment Sales Management 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 4, 2017

It’s common for leaders of sales teams to focus almost exclusively on short-term tactics and current operations while failing to think and act in a way that supports the longer-term needs of their businesses — and it’s hard to fault them. This danger is prevalent in sales. Denver Post/Getty Images.

Sales 8

Sales Sales Recruitment Sales Management 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 16, 2011

For many managers this is an important question: How far do I keep going on a project before I declare that it's "good enough" — and that further effort will not significantly change the outcome? Several years ago I worked with a project team charged with increasing sales to its large corporate customers.

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Sales Sales Scaling Sales Management 17

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 25, 2013

What separates great from good sales organizations? After working with over two-hundred different companies, the evidence suggests that the best business-to-business sales organizations share specific patterns of organizational structure and behavior. Darwinian Sales Culture. The first is in regards to hiring.

Sales 8

Sales Sales Revenue Accounts 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 25, 2012

Tommy was a director and Jane was the Midlands regional sales manager for Egan & Sons, a supplier of doors and staircases to Westmid for 63 years. But he could not shake his newfound awareness of the amount of money Egan was losing with Westmid — the account's ratio of operating income to sales was a negative 28%.

Sales 15

Sales Sales Accounts Sales Management 15

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 29, 2015

Oil and Gas subsea operators across the world are adopting a GE Industrial Internet technology developed in Norway. We can filter out the background noise, like marine life, and listen only to things we want”, explains Fabian Dawson, sales manager from GE Measurement and Control. Sponsor Content Insight from GE.

Engineering 15

Engineering Operations Software Sales Management 15

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 28, 2015

Customer journeys today are a complex series of interactions across multiple channels and platforms, where each point of contact has the potential to encourage the sale or derail it entirely. As Jo Coombs, Managing Director at OgilvyOne, London, observes, “I don’t think it can just be one or the other.

Operations 12

Operations Metrics Onboarding Sales 12

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 22, 2014

Boeing is America’s largest exporter and the only American defense contractor to have crossed $2 billion in sales to India. America’s largest insurer, Allstate, announced plans to invest $1 billion in its India operations. Two years later sales were stagnant in dollar terms. David Mulford, U.S.

Cash Flow 15

Cash Flow Government Sales Sales 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 23, 2017

Bosses’ perceptions of stress are offset by factors such as status, autonomy, and job security, which are generally higher for managers than for their employees. For example, my friend Terri is the regional sales manager for a medical device company, which was acquired by a larger firm six months ago.

Sales 15

Sales Sales Sales Management Assets 15

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 23, 2013

Getting them to market demands more than corporate systems can handle, so they must beg for IT upgrades, recruit and budget themselves, and even take on sales responsibilities to explain innovations to customers — which adds to the workload. So much pressure, yet they don’t seem to care about the money?

Compensation 14

Compensation Human Resources Sales Sales 14

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 24, 2010

But almost all of these are family businesses, operated by a husband and wife and several hired hands. By contrast, Syma Toys has over 1,000 employees and revenues of $28 million — a big enough enterprise to dedicate separate teams to design, manufacturing, and sales. Instead, managers tend to refer to development.

Sales 15

Sales Sales Sales Management Revenue 15