Sales Force Design For Strategic Advantage

This book focuses upon the role of the sales force in today's changing world and how to design a sales force for strategic advantage. It includes sections on how to assess the current sales force design and how to implement change and covers customer segmentation, market strategy, structuring and sizing, alignment, metrics and managing change.

Sales force effectiveness drives every company's success, but keeping a sales organization at the top of its game is a constant challenge. As experts in the field, Andy Zoltners and Prabha Sinha have helped sales leaders around the world perfect their sales strategy, operations, and execution. Combining strategic insight with pragmatic advice, Building a Winning Sales Force provides current and aspiring sales leaders with innovative yet practical solutions to many of the most common issues faced by today's sales organizations. With practical advice and case studies of companies that have conquered even the most challenging obstacles, Building a Winning Sales Force will enable every company to drive sales and stay competitive.

A well-designed and implemented incentive program is an essential tool for building a motivated, highly effective sales force that delivers the results you need. Incentive programs are seductively powerful but complicated instruments. Without careful planning and implementation, they can be too stingy to motivate, too complex to understand, too quick to reward mediocre results, and too difficult to implement. The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation is a practical, accessible, detailed roadmap to building a compensation system that gets it right by creating motivating incentives that produce positive outcomes. Packed with hundreds of real-life examples of what works and what doesn't, this important guide helps you: Understand the value of building an incentive plan that is aligned with your company's goals and culture. Avoid the common trap of overusing incentives to solve too many sales management problems. Measure the effectiveness of your current incentive program, employing easy-to-use tools and metrics for pinpointing its weak spots. Design a compensation plan that attracts and retains successful salespeople, including guidelines for determining the correct pay level, the best salary incentive mix, the proper performance measures, and the right performance payout relationship. Select an incentive compensation plan that works for your organization -- then test the plan before it is launched. Set territory-level goals that are fair and realistic, and avoid overpaying the sales force or demoralizing salespeople by having difficult goals or not fairly assigned. Create and manage sales contests, SPIFFs (Special Performance Incentive for Field Force), and recognition programs that consistently deliver the intended results. Manage a successful transition to a new compensation plan and build efficient administration systems to support your plan. Filled with ready-to-use formulas and assessment tools and a wealth of insights from frontline sales managers and executives, The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation is your hands-on, easy-to-read playbook for crucially important decisions.

Written by over 20 thought leaders from ZS Associates, Inc., The Power of Sales Analytics shares strategic insights, pragmatic advice, and illustrative case studies and approaches for using analytics to support sales force decisions and drive results. The authors describe how leading companies have successfully used analytics to improve key sales force effectiveness drivers such as customer targeting, sales process design, sales force size and structure, territory design, talent management, incentive compensation, goal setting, and performance management. The book also has a blueprint for implementing critical analytic capabilities cost-effectively by assembling the right combination of internal and external resources. The Power of Sales Analytics is edited by the founders of ZS Associates, Andris A. Zoltners and Prabhakant Sinha, who have personally consulted with more than 200 companies in over 20 countries, and business writer Sally E. Lorimer. As experts in the field of sales analytics, the editors have helped the sales leaders of Fortune 500 companies, as well as smaller entrepreneurial businesses, tap into the power of analytics to enable smarter sales strategies, support more efficient operations, facilitate more effective execution, and ultimately drive results. They are also coauthors of numerous academic articles and books on sales force management, including Building a Winning Sales Force, Accelerating Sales Force Performance, Sales Force Design for Strategic Advantage, The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation, and Building a Winning Sales Management Team. In addition to cofounding ZS Associates, Zoltners is a professor emeritus of marketing at Northwestern University s Kellogg School of Management, and Sinha is a former Kellogg faculty member. Both continue to teach sales executives Zoltners at Kellogg and Sinha at the Indian School of Business and the Gordon Institute of Business Science in South Africa. ZS Associates is a global leader in sales and marketing consulting, outsourcing, technology, and software. For more than 30 years, ZS has helped companies across a range of industries deliver greater impact through their sales and marketing investments and operations.

Pricing and the Sales Force is the first book to link pricing strategy and the sales force together. Pricing strategy is now well established as an important means of driving profits for many organizations. Countless companies are now mastering price-setting. But what about "price-getting" – converting those list prices into the realized sales, and as a result, greater profitability? This is the domain of the sales force. A selection of the world’s leading specialists explore different aspects of sales force and pricing strategy integration: introduction: overview on the state of the art; building key capabilities: best practices for building sales force capabilities in pricing and value quantification; engaging the sales force: driving organizational change processes with the sales force; designing effective selling processes: designing and implementing processes that enable superior performance, and; aligning sales force incentives and building the infrastructure: insights into how to align sales force incentive schemes; tools and instruments to enable the sales force to perform. The third in Hinterhuber and Liozu’s successful pricing series, this book is essential reading for pricing strategy and sales scholars and practitioners.

First-line sales managers (FLMs) play a key role in helping a sales organization drive profitable revenue growth in an ever-changing business environment. But although directly responsible for managing and driving sales force performance, FLMs often don't get enough time, attention, and resources from sales leaders. "Building a Winning Sales Management Team" shows just how important FLMs are to sales organizations--and what happens when companies underinvest in these key players. Authors of four previous books on sales management, Zoltners, Sinha and Lorimer show in "Building a Winning Sales Management Team" just how companies can nurture successful FLMs and improve sales force productivity. The book has dozens of real-life examples of how investing in first-line management paid off in a big way. In developing the book, the authors collaborated with leaders from some of the world's top companies. The authors also draw on their cumulative experience as sales and marketing consultants, faculty members at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and business speakers and writers to produce fresh, completely original insights on sales force effectiveness. "Building a Winning Sales Management Team" shows in detail exactly how companies can improve FLM performance. The authors reveal eight key drivers for defining, creating and enabling a successful first-line sales management team, and show how FLMs are critical facilitators of change. The book also includes a self-assessment tool to help organizations determine the right priorities to start improving sales management team performance.

How can organizations provide the right sales training to the right sales people at the right time? This book is filled with a diverse collection of case studies from top companies and provides a practical road map and the proven tools for organizations that want to implement a winning sales training program. The book offers helpful techniques and tips on how to successfully execute sales training with limited resources and cut budgets. It provides how-to guidelines for successful sales training in a down economy. It is written by 13 experts who have experience selling and have managed sales people. The contributors have combined experience of improving sales performance of over 120 years. The book contributors are Bob Rickert, Jim Graham, Teresa Hiatt, Michael Rockelmann, Maris Edelson, Susan Onaitis, Susanne Conrad, Rick Wills, Ken Phillips, Trish Uhl, Gary Summy, Lanie Jordan, and Renie McClay.

By analyzing and monitoring current trends in the marketplace, Contemporary Sales Force Management helps sales managers align resources and strategic efforts to gain an edge over competitors. You will develop an understanding of where current and prospective sales opportunities exist in order to fully utilize automation, how to update crisis management policies to reflect changing industry dynamics, and how to raise your level of sales efficiency through the use of customer advisory groups and sales technological tools, such as video conferencing, database management, and up-to-date industry software. Through the book’s important discussions on lowering mutual costs, building long-term customer relationships, improving sales skills, and developing core process skills, you will also learn to think and act with a strategic perspective that successfully steers the sales process. Grounded in practical applications, Contemporary Sales Force Management unites theoretical principles with applied examples and case studies gathered from research with major firms in dynamic markets such as Beijing and Shanghai in China, the European Union, and the United States. From these case studies demonstrating how top players achieve success, you gain critical information on: the role of the sales force manager in organizations strategic issues for an international sales effort gaining functional expertise in sales and marketing along with industry knowledge globalization and its impact on sales management strategies for applying Total Quality Management to sales electronic commerce and cultivating customers on the Web the consequences of having a poorly motivated sales force with low morale developing an environment that fosters and rewards the management of crisis understanding your biases and stereotypical assumptions about others and how these affect decisionmaking dealing with the legal and regulatory environment and ethical issues that arise in the course of managing the sales force Contemporary Sales Force Management is the book managers, entrepreneurs, business people, and faculty and students of executive business education programs have long awaited. Its sample sales plan, specific strategies, and hands-on advice will prove indispensable as you maneuver away from the coattails of your competitors into a leading position in the marketplace.