Leading the Effective Sales Force

Optimise your sales force performance for competitive advantage

When people and resources are scarce and expensive, you need to make every investment in your sales force count. Your sales force is a major growth engine and a critical source of market feedback. At the same time, it can rapidly become costly and difficult to manage. Leading the Effective Sales Force helps you optimise the performance of your sales force by learning to cut costs while increasing sales.

Discover how strategies like analysing your sales calls, realigning territories, shifting product or market emphases, reallocating salesperson time or adjusting sales force size can transform performance, generating maximum growth from your sales force. Learn to use compensation systems and organisational structures to motivate salespeople and third-party distribution channels to deliver outstanding results.

A joint INSEAD-Wharton marketing programme, Leading the Effective Sales Force is a five-day intensive experience that will change the way you approach sales and inspire results.

How you benefit

• Build competitive advantage. Learn how to make the sales force a key source of sustainable competitive advantage for your organisation.
• Motivate your sales force. Develop comprehensive approaches to motivate and compensate sales staff.
• Lead a dynamic sales team through new market challenges. Learn to manage a dynamic sales force in the face of increasing product, consumer and market complexity.

Content Overview

Leading the Effective Sales Force is a joint INSEAD-Wharton marketing programme designed to help you optimise the performance of your sales force, as well as cutting costs while increasing sales. During this five-day intensive programme, you will discover how to generate maximum growth from your sales force by analysing your sales calls, realigning territories, shifting product or market emphases, reallocating salesperson time or adjusting sales force size. At the same time, you will learn how to motivate salespeople and third-party distribution channels through compensation systems and organisational structures. Specifically, you will learn about the following.

Deployment and allocation of sales force resources

• The generic problems in deployment and allocation of sales force resources
• Identifying – and optimising – the relationship between resources and returns
• Interactive exercise in customising deployment and allocation software to your business contexts

Management and strategy of key account sales efforts

• Why do key account initiatives get into trouble?
• When does a key account strategy make sense?
• How to successfully design, execute and manage a key account initiative?

Compensation strategies

• The power and perils of compensation as a management tool
• Fundamental building blocks for design of sales force compensation
• The relationship between sales force compensation and sales force management

Realising judgemental biases and making better business decisions

• The unconscious heuristics and biases that impact managerial judgement and decision-making
• Remedies for correction of biases in decision-making
• How to improve decision-making – when is a group better than the manager?

Sales force effectiveness

• The drivers of superior performance in a sales force
• How to identify the right hire?
• What makes one salesperson more efficient than another?
• How to influence salesperson effectiveness?

Tackling emerging markets

• The sales force challenges in emerging economies
• The organisational and managerial challenges for leading sales forces in emerging economies
• Best practice