Building a Winning Sales Force: Powerful Strategies for Driving High Performance - Paperback

by Andris Zoltners (Author), Prabhakant Sinha (Author), Sally Lorimer (Author)

Sales experts Andy Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha, and Sally Lorimer provides you with innovative yet practical tips for success by offering solutions to many of the most common issues faced by today's sales organizations.

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, the authors have helped sales leaders around the world perfect their sales strategy, operations, and execution.

Drawing on their strategic insight and pragmatic advice, Building a Winning Sales Force shows you how to:

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

Filled with practical advice and case studies of companies that have conquered even the most challenging obstacles, Building a Winning Sales Force will enable your team to drive sales and help your company stay competitive.

Front Jacket

A high-performance sales force is one of the most critical components of any successful organization. But it is also a complex organism that is difficult to understand--and therefore extremely challenging to develop and lead. "Building a Winning Sales Force" is the most comprehensive and practical book ever written on the subject of designing, building, and driving a superior sales team. The book combines the wisdom and advice of three renowned sales experts whose experience ranges from the university classroom to the boardrooms of more than 400 sales organizations around the world. With this book as your guide, you will learn the changes to implement now that will immediately enhance the performance of all your sales professionals while also building new customer relationships, and, of course, driving your top and bottom line results--all without disrupting your current sales progress. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Develop sales strategies that build competitive advantage by demonstrating real value to customers * Structure your sales force to better exploit market opportunities * Use top-notch recruiting strategies that attract the best of the best * Arm your sales force with the best information and tools available * Design sales compensation programs that motivate for maximum effort * Set high but fair and consistent goals that every member of your sales force will want to exceed every period * Integrate sales and marketing strategies to create the ultimate customer-facing organization * Eradicate the "silent killer" of sales force effectiveness--complacency * And more. Practically every company can dramatically improve sales revenues by implementing the right effectiveness initiatives," the authors demonstrate, using numerous examples from their own client relationships--and they reveal how to achieve such elusive goals as more revenue, increased productivity, improved customer perception, and sales force retention. Rich with powerful strategies, illuminating examples and case studies, ready-to-use tools, and helpful illustrations, "Building a Winning Sales Force" provides a proven, customizable blueprint you can use to drive excellence and outstanding results in your business, quarter after quarter and year after year. Andris A. Zoltners is a professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He is a founder and co-chairman of ZS Associates, a global business consulting firm. For over 30 years, he has served the business community as a professor, consultant, speaker, and author on marketing and sales force performance. Prabhakant Sinha is a founder and co-chairman of ZS Associates, where he has consulted on sales effectiveness for more than 200 firms in North America, Europe, and Asia. A former faculty member of the Kellogg School of Management, he continues to teach sales executives at Kellogg and the Indian School of Business. Sally E. Lorimer is a consultant and business writer. She was previously a principal at ZS Associates, where she consulted with numerous companies on sales force effectiveness.

Back Jacket

ADVANCE Praise for Building a Winning Sales Force: "Building a Winning Sales Force combines the intellectual rigor and practical advice sales leaders need to be market-driven, customer-oriented and highly competitive." -- Philip Kotler, S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, KelloggSchool of Management, Northwestern University "The sales organization is an intricate puzzle, with the individual pieces only making sense when they fit together to create a complete picture. This book not only gives you the pieces, it also shows you how to assemble them into a winning sales force." -- Neil Rackham, bestselling author of SPIN Selling and Rethinking the Sales Force "The authors achieve the rare feat of providing sensible frameworks and instructive examples that address the most important problems facing today's sales forces. Build-ing a Winning Sales Force has rigor and relevance rolled into one." -- Kash Rangan, Malcolm McNair Professor of Marketing, HarvardBusinessSchool "Practical examples and lessons learned from a broad range of industries and experts kept me turning the pages to learn more." -- Gretchen Garrigues, Commercial Excellence Leader for GE Corporate Financial Services "The ideas in Building a Winning Sales Force work. We have used them to transform our sales organization . . . sales processes have become more disciplined and sales-people are delivering greater value to customers." -- Jeff Foland, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and ContractCenters, United Airlines "We apply the frameworks presented in this book throughout our planning cycles to prioritize the levers that drive selling excellence. As a result we regularly achieve improved global sales force performance." -- Gregory Schofield, Executive Vice President & Head of Global Sales, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.

Author Biography

Andris A. Zoltners (Evanston, IL) is a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Prabhakant Sinha (Chicago, IL) is Co-Chairman of ZS Associates, a global sales effectiveness and marketing consulting firm founded by Zoltners and Sinha in 1983. Andy and Prabha are the coauthors of "The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation" (978-0-8144-7324-5) and " The Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Force Performance " (978-0-8144-0650-2).

Sally E.Lorimer (Northville, MI) is a sales and marketing consultant and business writer.