Resources

New research shows that few companies are focusing on sales territory optimization. Yet intelligent territory design yields substantial productivity improvements - as much as 10% in a single year - to those firms who embrace it. Optimizing account assignments, territory design, and sales resource deployment might be the single highest-return...Read more

"Sales transformation" initiatives often fail. They aim to increase revenue and margins - and involve investment in new selling programs, processes and methodologies - but too frequently see inadequate results. Why For many, it's because analytics are poorly applied to change initiatives. This Sales Management Association webcast addresses the role...Read more

iPads are portable, compelling, and cost-effective, and they are having no small impact on the sales organization. More powerful than smart phones, and more mobile than laptops, iPads have an additional benefit uniquely suited to sales: they are consummately social devices. That is, they offer an easily share-able user experience....Read more

Dave Hoffmeister, Executive in Residence at the DePaul Center for Sales Leadership, provides a research briefing on the important characteristics of high performance sales organizations recently identified in the Center's biennial Sales Effectiveness Survey. Conducted over a six-month period among over 3,000 firms in the US, the results of this...Read more

Increased competition is among the toughest challenges facing sales organizations today. As pricing pressure mounts and customer budgets shrink, sales leaders must bring a new level of innovation to their efforts to beat the competition. In this webinar, AchieveGlobal’s Greg McDonald and Colleen O’Sullivan illustrate how best-in-class companies practice a...Read more

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