Sales Management

Successful sales management is not so much a program as it is a process; a number of essential components that, when designed carefully and assembled properly, work as a seamless unit to produce consistent sales excellence. Sales Management explains and presents a working model for tackling each important step. It then shows you how to use those models to excel in the changing business landscape where product/service life is shortening and sales cycles are lengthening and becoming more complex.

Sales Management covers everything today's sales management executive needs to know about:

• Strategy and objectives
• Hiring o Training o Compensation
• Organization
• Deployment
• Forecasts
• Sales plans
• Nonmonetary motivation
• Sales force automation
• Performance evaluations

As a sales manager, your career success depends on the success of your sales team. Let Sales Management show you how to recruit, train, and retain today's top sales talent-and mold them into a top-performing, cohesive sales unit!

Look to the McGraw-Hill Executive MBA Series for straight-talking, technique-filled books, written by front-line executive education professors and modeled after the programs of top business schools. Other titles in the series include:

• Finance & Accounting for Non-Financial Managers
• Mergers & Acquisitions

Sales Management details the strategy, tactics, qualitative and quantitative knowledge, and hands-on instruction found in today's finest business schools and executive education seminars, then outlines a step-by-step model for constructing and maintaining a superior sales organization. Sales managers, sales force team leaders, marketing executives, and other professionals can use its proven formulas for success, case studies, exercises, charts, checklists, and quizzes to discover how to:

• Always look for new, better salespeople, and treat hiring as a proactive-rather than reactive-tool

• Understand and use technology, sales force automation, customer relationship management, ecommerce, and the Internet to increase sales force productivity and capacity

• Use probing interview questions and reference checking to build a compelling, accurate picture of each job applicant, allowing you to hire the best and reduce turnover

• Test all salespeople-even those with years in the field-on products, competitors, customer knowledge, and selling skills. Use the results to create quarterly individual development plans

• Use focused "ride-withs" to observe change adoption, and reinforce best practices

• Expertly use proper channel choice, sales force architecture, targeting, deployment, sizing, and territory management to lower costs and increase revenues

• Profile each salesperson as to needs, goals, aspirations, and problems, then use this knowledge to personalize your motivational strategies

• Design compensation plans that reward salespeople's actions and results that are most important for your company's success

• Develop quarterly appraisals, which not only evaluate salespeople's results but also the skills, knowledge, action, and personal characteristics that drive those results

As a sales manager in today's global marketplace you are faced with enormous challenges, from more aggressive, agile competition to an increasingly rootless sales force. Let Sales Management-a new and important component of the McGraw-Hill Executive MBA Series-show you how to meet and overcome each of these challenges and put together a sales force that is confident, competitive, and committed to meeting and exceeding its sales goals.

Contents

Part I: Creating the Salesforce.
1. People, Process, Technology, and Performance.
2. Hiring the Best, Terminating the Rest.
3. Training for Results.
4. Sales Force Compensation.

Part II: Strategy and the Firm.
5. Sales Force Organization and Architecture.
6. Sales Forecasting and Sales Planning.
7. Motivating Salespeople.

Part III: Perfecting the Program.
8. Performance Evaluations.
9. Sales Force Automation.
Index