Quota attainment depends on two parties, you, the sales manager setting the quota and your sales people, executing your plan to reach quota. This article, we will be looking what you as a manager can do to improve quota attainment. It is always surprising how many sales managers, year over year fall into the following… Read More
About Christian Maurer
Don’t Throw the Baby Out With The Bathwater
It seems pretty obvious that the profound shifts in customer behavior render traditional sales processes obsolete. Why then do so many managers still insist on the compliance of their people to such processes? Most sales managers perceive any change proposed, on how to assure making their numbers, to be as risky as open heart surgery. … Read More
Draw A Picture Of An International Sales Team!
This was a task I gave to students on the first day of my graduate course on ”Structuring an International Sales Team”. You might consider this task more appropriate for the level of Kindergarten than for a graduate course. Permit me to disagree. I believe this task fits well in the trend of using gamification… Read More
It is the time of the year…
… where resolutions are made how to do better next year. Many are of the type « to do something new or different » fewer are of the type « to stop something ». William Lyon McKenzie King, the former Canadian Prime Minister is known for having set “Success often lies not in what you do, but what you… Read More
What is a reasonable number of contacts in your social network?
This is the second post based on a keynote I presented at the 10thannual RiiM conference in Paris on the beginning of April 2015. The previous post looked from an anthropological perspective for clues how to find the right balance between the quantity of contacts and the quality of relations. In the age of Social Selling, imbalances… Read More
What is the Sales Effectiveness of Your Organization and Yourself?
Why should you care?Businesses are under constant pressure for productivity improvements. Sales organizations are not excluded from this demand. Yet for most salespeople and sales organizations, working harder than they already are is probably no longer an option to increase productivity. The way out of this dilemma is thus to try to work smarter. Working… Read More
What is wrong with the Hunter / Farmer Metaphor?
Putting the right person into the right sales role is one of the key responsibilities of a sales manager. The Hunter / Farmer metaphor is frequently used as guidance to fulfill this demanding task. Is this still a valid concept today with informed self directed buyers? I have assisted many heated debates about the usefulness… Read More
What‘s the Matter with Sales Performance?
Observation Whether you plot the evolution of quota attainment over the last few years (CSO Insights) or you prefer to plot sales forecast accuracy as a metric to express sales performance and compare this with the trend of spending on CRM systems over the same period of time (Gartner), you will be in for a… Read More