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Building a Winning Sales Force

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Building a Winning Sales Force

Powerful Strategies for Driving High Performance

AMACOM,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

A learned report on building your sales staff: How to master 12 driving forces to make your sales team a star.

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

To reveal the potential of your sales force, analyze and evaluate 12 sales effectiveness drivers. Maximize the benefits of those drivers and you often can maximize sales. Sales experts Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha and Sally E. Lorimer explain how these drivers work. Their comprehensive book is filled with flow charts, scatter plots and other graphic presentations of data, underscoring the authors’ technical rigor. The book also offers case studies that bring the authors’ points down to earth. If the painstaking information is any indication, this team has thought long and hard about improving sales force effectiveness and it understands the subject exceedingly well. getAbstract believes readers can learn a great deal about building a great sales force from these astute observers.

Summary

The “Sales System” and the “World of Sales”

Businesses make huge investments in their sales forces. For example, U.S. companies spend $800 billion annually on sales, 300% more than on advertising. Corporations need to get a strong return on this sizable investment and now they can. When companies implement the correct sales effectiveness initiatives, revenues climb 10% on average. But determining the right initiatives is not easy. To do so, firms must examine five sales system elements: “company results, customer results, activities, salespeople” and, the most important element of all, their “sales effectiveness drivers.”

A company’s individual sales system exists within a larger world-of-sales framework. This sales system determines how the sales division functions internally and how it works with the corporation’s other divisions. The company’s industry and the business conditions it faces also shape the sales system.

The sales process is the most dynamic of corporate processes. Market conditions constantly change, as do customers’ wants, needs and expectations. New products relentlessly emerge. Some competitors get stronger, others weaker. Government regulatory...

About the Authors

Andris A. Zoltners, Ph.D., teaches marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Prabhakant Sinha, Ph.D., teaches sales at the Indian School of Business and at Kellogg. Sally E. Lorimer is a consultant and writer on developing sales force effectiveness. They are also the authors of Sales Force Design for Strategic Advantage.

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    V. A. 10 years ago
    I strongly recommend getting the actual book. As the reviewer points out, there are charts/plots/graphs that really need to be seen to appreciate the meat of this book. No offense to the "summarizer", but I don't think ANY summary by anyone will do the book justice.