Harvard Business Review on Strategic Sales Management (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series) |  | Creator: Harvard Business School Press
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 100,436
Media: Paperback
Pages: 197
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 1422114929
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.81
EAN: 9781422114926
ASIN: 1422114929
Publication Date: April 12, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
You invest considerable time and money in managing your sales force. And if your company's like many, you're finding it increasingly difficult to ensure handsome returns on your investment in sales. This concise volume gives you the insights you need - from the preeminent thinkers whose work has defined the field, to the rising stars who will redefine the way we think about business.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Powerful Reference Tool for a Sales Veteran, Rookie and Everyone In-between November 19, 2008
Bill Todd, Sales Motivational Speaker (Bethesda MD)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book is an excelent reference tool for sales veterans, rookies and everyone in-between. It focuses on the important lessons learned when you blend sales persistence, creativity and tenacity with a big dose of motivation from management. As a sales motivational speaker I must provide my audiences the most effective ideas that will have the biggest impact on their sales performance. What I like about this book is that it expertly combines cutting edge sales management strategies with the solid reinforcement gleamed from the basics of sales management 101. I will recommend this book to my audiences time and time again.
Valuable perspectives on results-driven sales initiatives June 5, 2009
Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is one of the volumes in the "Ideas with Impact" series, each of whose articles originally appeared in an issue of the Harvard Business Review. In this instance, all of them appeared in a special issue (July of 2006) and their subject is Strategic Sales Management. As the editors correctly point out, "You must invest considerable time and money in managing your sales force. And if your company is like many, you'll find it increasingly difficult to ensure handsome returns on your investment in sales. This concise volume gives you the insights you need to maximize results from your sales team and plan for future growth." All of the eight articles were written or co-written by experts on this specific business subject. Here in Dallas near the downtown area, there is a Farmers Market at which several of the merchants offer a slice of fresh fruit as a sample. In that spirit, I now offer a sequence of brief excerpts that will, I hope, indicate the "taste" as well as the thrust of the ideas in the articles.
From "How Right Should the Customer Be?": "In this article, we'll describe the potential fallout from conflicts within your force management system [between putting customer first and putting district or regional managers first], and we'll explain how you can tell which kind of control system is appropriate to your company's strategy, competitive environment, and time horizon." Erin Anderson and Vincent Onyemah
From "Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing": When sales and marketing are combined, "this means integrating such straightforward activities as planning, target setting, customer assessment, and value-proposition development. It's tougher, though. To integrate the two groups' processes and systems; these must be replaced with common processes, metrics, and rewards systems. Organizations need to develop shared databases, as well as mechanisms for continuous improvement. Hardest of all is changing the culture to support integration." "Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Suj Krishnaswamy
From "Match Your Sales Force Structure to Your Business Life Cycle": "When the sales force starts to worry about downsizing, the best sales people will be the first to leave. Even as companies prepare to let other people go, they must pay stars handsomely to keep them. In addition, strong leadership is essential during downsizing, and only timely and straightforward communication from sales leaders can maintain a reasonable level of morale and motivation." Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimar
From "Understanding What Your Sales Manager Is Up Against": "For a salesperson, a steady stream of leads is nirvana. Right now, our survey shows, about 20% of a salesperson's time is spent on prospecting. The value of freeing up some of that time for pursuing already-defined opportunities is obvious. Also, when the flow of leads is more robust, the qualifications of those leads tends to be more rigorous; the candidates that do make it into the sales pipeline tend to have shorter sales cycles, higher contributions to profits, fewer complications, and higher customer-satisfaction ratings." Barry Trailer and Jim Dickie
From "Better Sales Networks": "To better understand sales networks, it's helpful to view the sales process as four distinct stages: identifying prospects, gaining buy-in from potential customers, creating solutions, and closing the deal." All four are rigorously examined, with suggestions how to improve each, by Tuber Üstüner and David Godes.
From "The Sales Learning Curve": "Companies have long measured their progress along the manufacturing curve by tracking costs per unit - the more they learn about the manufacturing process, the more efficient it becomes, and the lower the unit cost goes. Progress along the sales learning curve is measured in an analogous way: The more a company learns about its product, market, and sales process, the more efficient it becomes at selling, and the higher the sales yield...defined as the average annual sales revenue per full-time, fully trained and effective sales representative. Typically, sales yield starts out slowly, accelerates for a while, and then flattens out as the product natures, in a classic S curve." Mark Leslie and Charles A Holloway
From "The Ultimately Accountable Job: Leading Today's Sales Organization": "If the customer is king these days, who lives within his inner circle? Of all the functions, the sales organization comes closest, and the CSO is thus the most effective conduit for funneling customer-related insights to the rest of the senior executive team. The successful sales leader spends more time with customers today not only because they have valuable things to say but also because they demand to be heard by their suppliers' most senior people. As other, nonsales senior executives throughout the company respond to such demands, the CSO can serve as a role model for his peers in interacting with customers." Jerome A. Colleti and Mary S. Fiss
Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out William ("Skip") Miller's ProActive Sales Management: How to Lead, Motivate, and Stay Ahead of the Game, Robert A. Simpkins' The Secrets of Great Sales Management: Advanced Strategies for Maximizing Performance, Wayne M. Thomas' The Sales Manager's Success Manual, Dean R. Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Enterprise Architecture as Strategy co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.
 Harvard Business Review on Strategic Sales Management August 2, 2008
Joe T. Trueblood (McKinney, TX)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Excellent review of strategic sales management topics. This is a very good resource for sales leaders with a basic to intermediary experience and a good refresher for advanced sales leaders.
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