Building a Winning Sales Management Team: The Force Behind the Sales Force

Building a Winning Sales Management Team: The Force Behind the Sales Force

Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha, Sally E. Lorimer

Language: English

Pages: 284

ISBN: 0985343605

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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.

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She is splitting the current sales force’s responsibilities into two distinct roles: sales specialist and clinical specialist. Sales specialists will focus on selling and closing deals, while clinical specialists will perform technical product demonstrations and provide customer support and training. By splitting the sales role, customers will benefit from increased sales force knowledge and expertise. Karen can hire experienced sellers of capital equipment to work as sales specialists, and.

Alternative reporting structures (see Figure 3-8). The best reporting structure in a sales force with specialists depends on the relative importance of the sales manager’s role as a people manager versus a business or customer manager (see Chapter 2). Alternative 1 makes sense if sales managers function largely as people managers. The structure enables regional managers to reinforce the activity expertise and focus of their people. Sales specialists have a different success profile and require.

Team. Often, the challenges for large companies are to provide valuable guidance (not just large amounts of data or overhead), to make support useful to a diverse group of FLMs with a range of needs and skills, to ensure that support resources focus on important aspects of the FLM role and continue to add value over time, and to stay flexible and responsive to changing business needs. Best Practices for Enhancing Overall FLM Team Effectiveness Through Support When it comes to supporting FLMs,.

Provide feedback to let headquarters know if new strategies are working in the field. They can share feedback on how customers react to the change and can suggest modifications or adjustments that align business strategies with customer and field needs. The Power of the FLM as a Change Implementer Competency at managing during times of change usually varies across FLM team members. But it is important to engage all FLMs effectively in the sales force change process—including those who are not.

Make sense to require current FLMs to go through a selection process (see Chapter 5) to determine which ones have the characteristics required for success in the new job and which are better suited to a different role either inside or outside the company. Help Your FLMs Put a Change Management Process into Action “There is a real fear of disrupting customer relationships in sales forces, and this inhibits companies from implementing many positive sales force changes,” says Chris Ahearn.

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