Is your team struggling with sales coaching? Leverage existing sales knowledge to drive more meaningful coaching discussions.  In my previous post, I shared two metrics (quantity and quality) that could be used to provide insight into the effectiveness of your sales management team.  This led to the obvious question: How does one improve coaching capabilities that results in sustainable improvements?  Quantity is an easy one to fix. Quality... now that can be difficult to pull off.  It's easy to change behavior temporarily.  How do you drive sustainable action? As soon as deadlines approach, and the s_ _ _ hits the fan, all bets are off --- all progress is forgotten.

Using a workload capacity model to design territories is a concise and succinct method to assure that your organization’s sales talent is well aligned with market demand.  A sales leader must understand and quantify several key pieces of information in order to use a workload capacity model in territory design:

77% of VPs of Sales are attending customer/prospect meetings less than 2 full days per quarter.  Our 2011 sales force design study revealed this alarming statistic.  Think about this:

Nearly 50% of Sales Managers will miss their team quota in 2012.

Sales Force Size affects customers, salespeople and the overall company.  If the sales team is too small, it cannot serve the needs of the customer effectively.  If it’s too large, reps become an annoyance to clients and a drain on company resources.  The goal of a sizing analysis is to ensure the size of a sales force correlates with market dynamics by matching selling capacity to actual demand. Doing so will ensure highest revenue potential and sales cost optimization.

While many aspects of Sales Performance Management (SPM) have been receiving growing attention in recent years, one driver of performance has been on the radar for years: compensation management.  The concept of comp plans driving performance in sales is not a new development, and technological solutions to determining compensation have developed as capabilities have increased.  Yet, a CSO Insights survey from as recent as last year indicated that fewer than 14% of companies surveyed used a commercially developed Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) solution.  In fact, over half the companies surveyed were calculating comp manually.  Given the array of solutions available, this comes as a bit of a surprise.

“Why do some sales managers get promoted and others just change companies never moving up the ladder? How can a sales manager get promoted to a director or VP?  What does it take to move to the next level?”  I get asked these questions every week. Everyone wants to know what the ‘secret sauce’ is to get more responsibility and fatter paychecks.

Over the course of the past 15 weeks, sales organizations have invested heavily in their upcoming Sales Kick-Off events.  Planning was focused around how to best leverage the “precious” time when the entire sales organization was together.  The themes, topics, and venues all became eerily similar.   The typical Sales Kick-Off agenda covered 3 main topics:

Our sales consulting firm has helped dozens of companies map the buying process for their product or service.  Over time, we have developed a process to do this correctly.  Part of this process is to assign this responsibility to a department.  Here is what we have learned:

In most Channel Management books, we see multiple chapters outlining the key steps for Manufacturing Firms to choose their Channel Partners.  These publications, while valuable to “A-list” level manufacturing firms, conjure up images of ABC’s “The Bachelor”.   In this dreamlike scenario, the manufacturer chooses the top 10% channel partners while the tearful losers take the limo home.