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Tuesday, June 25th, 2019
Dutch ICT Woman of the Year, Monic van Aarle is a sales director working with a diverse range of SAP’s customers in the Netherlands. Monic van Aarle has been working at SAP for 15 years and in sales for a total of 37 years – which stacks up to a significant amount of experience. Starting her career in marketing, she…
Wednesday, March 27th, 2019
How to make a successful transition from individual contributor to manager? Project aim The purpose of this project is to examine whether the transition from high-performing salesperson to effective sales manager can be made more successful. As McCall (2010) highlights, there is a big risk to this promotion: “When situations change dramatically, as is the case when a person is…
Friday, March 22nd, 2019
This project from 2016 explores how to create a sales control system designed to deliver a company’s key objectives. Introduction Sales is no longer an independent isolated function within an organisation, but is an integral and cross-functional part of a company’s strategy (Storbacka et al 2011). Sales now not only executes the strategy, but helps create and drive the strategy…
Thursday, March 21st, 2019
In general, deals won have been less…
Friday, April 28th, 2017
Mark Weinberg Why do sales organisations fall short? Every day, expert consultants like Mike Weinberg are called on by companies large and small to find the answer – and it’s one that may surprise you. Typically, the issue lies not with the sales team – but with how it is being led. Through their attitude and actions, senior executives and…
Friday, April 28th, 2017
Luis R. Gomez-Mejia (author), Pascual Berrone (contributor), Monica Franco-Santos (contributor) This research-oriented textbook focuses on the relationship between compensation systems and overall firm performance. In contrast to more traditional compensation texts, it provides a strategic perspective to compensation administration rather than a functional viewpoint. The text emphasizes the role of managerial pay, its importance, determinants, and impact on organizations. It…
Friday, April 28th, 2017
Authors Bill Donaldson, Javier Marcos Cuevas, Régis Lemmens Professional selling and sales management have become more complex and multifaceted than ever before, but also a more exciting and stimulating function and profession. Sales Management provides a comprehensive introduction to selling and sales management. Packed full of insightful real-world case studies, the fully updated and revised fourth edition of this highly…
Sunday, April 23rd, 2017
In our previous article in this series, “The classic performance dilemma”, we presented a brief outline of the properties of effective sales performance measurement systems. In this follow-up article, we focus on a widespread practice in sales organisations: the use of sales targets or goals. We highlight the key issues associated with performance targets and offer guidelines to minimise their…
Sunday, April 23rd, 2017
The old saw states that a poor workman blames his tools. These days, it could also be said that a successful sales manager credits his tools for guiding his success, but to use the tools available to them, sales managers need help. Manual systems for managing commissions and other sales processes don’t capture data in a form that allows fast…
Saturday, April 22nd, 2017
Revenue attainment was 23 percent higher for organizations that invest over $5,000 in their sales managers compared with those which invest nothing. However, only 8% of participants make such a substantial investment in their managers. The findings are in a report from Miller Heiman Group’s research arm, CSO Insights, published recently. The 2017 Sales Manager Enablement Report Sales Managers: Overwhelmed…
Sunday, January 29th, 2017
Review and summary of sales talent analytics findings based on data from over 1,000 recent Sales Account Manager assessments. This “hybrid role” is one that many organisations use as the bedrock of their sales strategy. To have a core of salespeople able to carry out a straightforward account management function, while also being able to fulfil a new-business sales role…
Tuesday, November 29th, 2016
The GSK bribery scandal rocked pharma when a record fine was handed down in 2014. It has forced the company and the wider industry to reconsider their sales approaches. Just over two years ago the Wall Street Journal reported that UK drug giant GSK’s local subsidiary in China had been found guilty of bribery and fined nearly half a billion…
Tuesday, November 29th, 2016
On average, 60.1% of a company’s revenues…
Saturday, September 3rd, 2016
As part of his Masters programme, SAP’s Brice Faure researched whether a sustainable coaching methodology could support SAP sales managers during the process of transforming the business into the Cloud. The concept of coaching has been much discussed in recent decades and part of my project has been to understand what coaching means and embraces. Too often in my reading,…
Thursday, April 7th, 2016
The data analysis provided here offers insight into what motivates “account managers”. Motivators are the extrinsic factors that determine whether your salespeople really get up in the morning “ready to rock and roll”’ – or not! The global data in the following charts provide insight into what motivates people from different regions. It will help sales leaders decide whether in…
Saturday, January 30th, 2016
Continuing from the review of sales manager behaviours by region in the previous edition of the Journal, this time we are looking at regional variations in skills, critical reasoning and motivators (what motivates the individual sales manager) across the same group of sales managers. Data published in edition 1.3 (October 2015) indicated that sales managers in China were behaviourally less…
Saturday, January 30th, 2016
While coaching is universally considered to be a vital predictor of salesperson success, benchmarking data from Blackdot suggests that sales manager coaching of reps is happening far less than expected and is highly variable in consistency. According to the report Unlocking Sales Manager Coaching Impact – A holistic approach for enhancing coaching outcomes, the typical solution has been to try…
Saturday, October 31st, 2015
What can we discover from research about the best way of dealing with problem salespeople? In the 15 years I have spent working with frontline sales managers, one particular issue has loomed larger than any other. Specifically, when a sales manager is faced with a problem with one or more of their salespeople, how best should they deal with it?…
Thursday, October 1st, 2015
Key takeaways There are clear common themes across all regions, especially notable is Planning and organising. “You would have thought that this would be a key factor for sales managers to be strong but clearly not!” comments Andrew Dugdale of SalesAssessment.com, the company that provided the data. Also notable by its absence is Interpersonal sensitivity – “yet another key sales…
Sunday, April 12th, 2015
Blackdot on the value of sales managers First-line sales managers are drivers of performance for pharma sales representatives, as they are in other industries… The profound and compounding impact sales managers have on their sales teams means that 1 high-performing sales manager is as valuable as a handful of high-performing sales reps. High-performing sales managers manage teams that achieve superior…
