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.

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.

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.

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. The book shows readers how to: assess how good their sales force really is • identify sales force improvement opportunities • implement tools and processes that have immediate impact on sales effec­tive­ness • attract and retain the best salespeople • design incen­tive compensation plans • set goals • manage sales perform­ance • motivate the sales force 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.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.