Engage

Sales should be a core agent of strategy, not just a vehicle for a given selling methodology. In my career, I have attended many strategy meetings. Very few articulate the implications of espoused strategies for Sales. Moreover, the process for introducing new initiatives often exacerbates the separation of the “strategists” from the “doers” in the field. The typical process is… 

Where selling was once seen as the “white-collar equivalent of cleaning toilets”, now it’s the skill that everybody needs. We’re all salespeople today. The problem is that too many people in society – including a worryingly large number of leaders at the top of big corporations – remain in denial about this plain, simple truth. We used to think of… 

Why it has become commonplace for organisations to seek to avoid paying commission earned by salespeople? Commission payments seem so simple in concept: the salesperson wins a deal and the employer pays a certain percentage of its value to reward him or her for this success and the benefit it brings to the company. In reality, incentives are a minefield:… 

Sales is evolving into a true profession as corporations, practitioners and academics combine in the search for excellence. Welcome to the very first issue of the International Journal of Sales Transformation. As salespeople, managers and leaders, we are rightly proud of the fact that we are in the front line of business, creating and facilitating exchanges of value and aiming… 

As sales continues to develop at breakneck pace, business and academics need to open channels of communication. For well over a century, there have been organised attempts to increase sales professionalism. The case for doing so is nowhere more engagingly expressed than in an editorial appearing in 1884 in the magazine of the Society of Commercial Travelers: “If we do…