• Turnover of good people has increased significantly.
• Customer retention is good, but new customer acquisition is flagging.
• The sales force is unmotivated.
• Territory goals are not motivating the proper behavior.

• The incentive plan is encouraging too much effort on the existing products, and not enough on the new ones.
• Many departments in a company are dealing with the same customer, but the lack of coordination is creating customer confusion.
• Sales managers are spending too much time doing administrative tasks, and not enough time providing training, coaching, and feedback.

Background of the Project

In 1976, professors Prabha Sinha and Andris Zoltners first applied their quantitative skills in a consulting project for a selling organization. They helped a pharmaceutical firm size and structure its sales force. This first project grew into a global consulting company, ZS Associates, with more than four hundred employees and sales force consulting experience in over sixty countries. ZS Associates has developed numerous competencies that address issues such as go-to-market strategy, sales force size and structure, sales force productivity assessment, compensation, customer relationship management, sales territory alignment, using information effectively, targeting, resource allocation, performance evaluation, and recruitment. Projects addressing these issues in over twenty industries have solved pressing problems and added many hundreds of millions of dollars to their client's profits. Concurrent with their consulting work, Sinha and Zoltners continued teaching sales force theory and practice to M.B.A. students and sales executives at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. They have developed an extensive library of teaching materials, conceptual frameworks, and sales force insights over two decades. They had been discussing a book on sales forces for over ten years, but their busy schedules had precluded significant progress. Finally, writer Greg Zoltners provided enough additional assistance to permit the book to proceed.

Its Place in the Literature

Sales forces, although a critical marketing channel for many companies, are underrepresented in publications compared to other, more trendy topics such as advertising, database marketing, marketing channels, consumer behavior, business-to-business marketing, and technology. Sales forces, which combine individualistic sales personalities with complex issues involving pay for performance, data-based customer targeting, proper performance evaluation, and new technology, are a source of power and a significant managerial challenge for both executives and managers. Sales force managers combine art with science more than managers in many other managerial areas. This book provides a structure for sales force decisions, educates, and serves as a sourcebook of practical ideas for managers.

The Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Force Performance provides education the way a textbook does, but it also provides guidance. It advises, similar to a sales manager's manual, and it seeks to provide the sales manager with an understanding of the entire sales force system by presenting frameworks for sales force design and performance enhancement. It is definitely not the written version of a motivational speech. Neither is it about the art of selling. Nor is it a personal improvement guide for a salesperson. Rather, it is a managerial guide to the sales force system. It provides the thinking frameworks and practical insights that can be useful in enhancing the management of a selling organization. The book melds sales management science with practical insights.

The authors are consultants, academics, and businessmen. They have worked all over the world with sales forces of all sizes in many industries, and they have published academic papers about their research. They have sold consulting services, managed others who sell consulting services, helped companies manage salespeople, and taught students about managing salespeople. This book contains the knowledge and wisdom gained from twenty-five years of experience in the sales force arena. The frameworks have been used repeatedly, and they work. Often, the material is common sense organized in a straightforward way; other times it is barely the beginning of a solution. When solving problems in the real world, one sees all levels of solution elegance and degrees of implementation ease. Sales forces are the unruly beasts of the management forest-crucial because of the sales they create, yet hard to control and change because they are about people dealing with other people.

Main Themes

The first chapter describes how to determine the role of the sales force in the ideal go-to-market strategy. The concepts in this chapter are especially important in an Internet-assisted world. The second chapter provides a framework to assess the effectiveness of a selling organization and explains how sales are the consequence of various sales force success drivers, such as sizing, hiring, training, deployment, and compensation. Subsequent chapters examine the sales force drivers. In addition, the chapters examine best practices and strategies, and then present a process for determining a performance enhancement strategy for the particular driver. Each chapter ends with some concluding observations. For example, in the chapter on compensation, different compensation plans are described and the conditions that favor each one are explained. A compensation design process is shown, and some compensation caveats are presented. The chapters also incorporate sections that describe how the Internet will affect each sales force success driver.

Audience

The Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Force Performance is written for two types of readers. The first is the business community, especially sales managers, top managers, salespeople who want to advance professionally, divisional presidents, and business owners. For this group, this book is a go-to reference manual.

The second target audience is students in universities. Sales force management is universally taught in undergraduate, graduate, and executive business school programs. There is a sales force management class or mini-class offered in most business programs. This book provides a comprehensive view of the significant decisions faced by any selling organization. The material in its chapters has been used in M.B.A. classes and executive programs at Kellogg for over twenty years.

Key Industries Cited

The authors have personally consulted for several hundred companies in over fifty countries in many industries. Industry experience includes work for companies in the biomedical, chemical, computer, consumer products, durable goods, electronics, financial services, medical supplies and equipment, industrial distribution, information services, insurance, media and information, office equipment, oil, paper, pharmaceutical, technology, telecommunications, and utility industries. The text provides many industry illustrations. Best practices and theories from many sales forces have been extracted and generalized for any sales force.

Author's Acknowledgements

We have worked with many fine companies over the years. Without them, we would not have discovered much of the material in the book. Because of confidentiality, many of them must remain nameless, but our thanks go to those who are constantly trying to improve the productivity of their sales forces. We would like to thank Northwestern's J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management for providing a fertile environment for ideas to flourish. Thanks go to our M.B.A. and executive students, whose lively classroom discussions kept our theoretical exuberance in check. The material in the book has benefited tremendously from its use with students in executive courses at the Allen Center of Kellogg. We are grateful to our colleagues at Northwestern and elsewhere who supported us academically and as friends.

We would also like to thank the people of ZS Associates, a consulting firm that provides a laboratory for the ideas and research for many of the topics in the book. The consultants at ZS contributed to the book through their creativity and through their evaluation of our concepts. It has been our pleasure to work with some of the finest consultants and businesspeople on the planet. Special contributions came from Samantha Alfassa, Jaideep Bajaj, Julie Billingsley, Maneesh Chandra, Jeff Foland, Songjun Luo, Murali Mantrala, Kathryn McKay, David Mogul, Mike Moorman, Abhijit Nimgaonkar, Jean-Jacques Raoult, Richard Schuerger, Kathy Schwenk, Nancy Smith, Marshall Solem, and Chris Wright. We would like to thank Iraj Ajir and Jeff Blakely of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, who helped with the chapters on training and performance management. Thanks also go to Marilyn Murphy of the IBM Corporation who helped with the go-to-market chapter. We owe very special thanks to a trio of research and editorial superstars, Sally Lorimer, Jill Wittwer, and Linda Kluver. Sally Lorimer applied her sales force expertise in reviewing every chapter for content and clarity. She rewrote many sections where she felt improvement was needed. She also researched and organized the Internet content that appears in most chapters. Her research improved the quality of the book substantially. Jill Wittwer edited our work thoroughly. She has suggested thousands of changes to various drafts of the manuscript. Her knowledge and skill facilitated a straightforward exposition of complicated and sometimes confusing ideas. Linda Kluver developed all of the book's illustrations. Her careful attention to detail made her proofreading nearly superhuman. Alice Manning of the AMACOM Book Division of American Management Association provided a final editing of the book. It is only with the help of these fine collaborators that this book can be in your hands today.

It is time to put our feet to the floor and begin to accelerate sales force performance.