Prabhakant Sinha

Sales leadership essentials for an era of rapidly advancing digital technology. Managing an effective sales organization is key to revenue generation, customer satisfaction, and business results. But whether you're a sales manager or leading a large sales force, it's increasingly challenging to balance success today with driving the digital sales transformation that will position your team for the future. With actionable insights and examples from many industries worldwide, the HBR Sales Management Handbook provides the resources you need to build value for your company, your customers, and your sales teams. The book covers the fundamentals every sales manager needs to know and explores today's most challenging issues around digital: bringing value to informed and self-sufficient customers while managing the business; hiring, developing, and retaining the best talent; managing sales in the remote, multichannel world; using AI and analytics to support critical decisions; navigating change with continuous improvement; and building the next generation of sales information hubs. Your job as a sales leader is vast and dynamic. This handbook is a collection of proven and forward-looking ideas to help you, your salespeople, and your customers win. HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, and real-life stories, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack—whatever your role.

The future of AI is here. The world is transfixed by the marvel (and possible menace) of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. It's clear Gen AI will transform the business landscape, but when and how much remain to be seen. Meanwhile, your smartest competitors are already navigating the risks and reaping the rewards of these new technologies. They're experimenting with new business models around generating text, images, and code at astonishing speed. They're automating customer interactions in ways never before possible. And they're augmenting human creativity in order to innovate faster. How can you take advantage of generative AI and avoid having your business disrupted? Generative AI: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you understand the potential of these new technologies, pick the right Gen AI projects, and reinvent your business for the new age of AI. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.

The future of AI is here. The world is transfixed by the marvel (and possible menace) of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. It's clear Gen AI will transform the business landscape, but when and how much remain to be seen. Meanwhile, your smartest competitors are already navigating the risks and reaping the rewards of these new technologies. They're experimenting with new business models around generating text, images, and code at astonishing speed. They're automating customer interactions in ways never before possible. And they're augmenting human creativity in order to innovate faster. How can you take advantage of generative AI and avoid having your business disrupted? Generative AI: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you understand the potential of these new technologies, pick the right Gen AI projects, and reinvent your business for the new age of AI. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.

This helpful guide develops an effective, innovative framework for evaluating and improving the performance of any sales force. Every firm’s sales force combines the distinctive personalities of its members with the complex issues of size, pay structure, incentives, performance evaluation, and effective uses of new technology. While underrepresented in most marketing texts, the success of the sales force is a major component in the overall success of most companies. The Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Force Performance develops an effective, innovative framework for evaluating and improving the performance of any sales force. This book identifies and describes the key factors for creating a fast-track, go-to-market strategy. It’s loaded with proven ideas for improving such "success drivers" as:culturesales force structurehiringsales manager selectiontrainingcompensationtechnologysales territory designgoal settingperformance managementPacked with valuable insights and real-life examples, The Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Force Performance is an excellent source of practical ideas for sales and marketing managers in all industries.

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.

First-line sales managers (FLMs) play a key role in helping a sales organization drive profitable revenue growth in an ever-changing business environment. But although directly responsible for managing and driving sales force performance, FLMs often don't get enough time, attention, and resources from sales leaders. "Building a Winning Sales Management Team" shows just how important FLMs are to sales organizations--and what happens when companies underinvest in these key players. Authors of four previous books on sales management, Zoltners, Sinha and Lorimer show in "Building a Winning Sales Management Team" just how companies can nurture successful FLMs and improve sales force productivity. The book has dozens of real-life examples of how investing in first-line management paid off in a big way. In developing the book, the authors collaborated with leaders from some of the world's top companies. The authors also draw on their cumulative experience as sales and marketing consultants, faculty members at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and business speakers and writers to produce fresh, completely original insights on sales force effectiveness. "Building a Winning Sales Management Team" shows in detail exactly how companies can improve FLM performance. The authors reveal eight key drivers for defining, creating and enabling a successful first-line sales management team, and show how FLMs are critical facilitators of change. The book also includes a self-assessment tool to help organizations determine the right priorities to start improving sales management team performance.

Designing an incentive plan to turn sales reps into sales superstars If you're like most sales leaders, your incentive program is a constant challenge, as you try to jumpstart sales, energize a geographically dispersed and autonomous workforce, and motivate salespeople to achieve ambitious revenue goals. And sometimes it seems like you just don't know what works; your products and markets are changing, the incentive program that was so successful last year no longer produces the desired results, or perhaps the generous incentive program you created has yielded a corps of highly paid salespeople who spend most of their time on existing clients and minimal time generating new business -- and threaten to walk away with your customer base if you scale back paychecks Incentive programs are seductively powerful but complicated instruments. Without careful planning and implementation, they can be too stingy to motivate, too complex to understand, too quick to reward mediocre results, and too difficult to implement. But a well-designed and implemented incentive program is an essential tool for building a motivated, highly effective sales force that delivers the results you need. The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation is a practical, accessible, detailed roadmap to building a compensation system that gets it right by creating motivating incentives that produce positive outcomes. Packed with hundreds of real-life examples of what works and what doesn't, this important guide helps you: Understand the value of building an incentive plan that is aligned with your company's goals and culture. Avoid the common trap of overusing incentives to solve too many sales management problems. Measure the effectiveness of your current incentive program, employing easy-to-use tools and metrics for pinpointing its weak spots.  Design a compensation plan that attracts and retains successful salespeople, including guidelines for determining the correct pay level, the best salary incentive mix, the proper performance measures, and the right performance payout relationship. Select an incentive compensation plan that works for your organization -- then test the plan before it is launched. Set territory-level goals that are fair and realistic, and avoid overpaying the sales force because goals are too easy, or demoralizing salespeople by having goals that are too difficult or not fairly assigned. Create and manage sales contests, SPIFFs (Special Performance Incentive for Field Force), and recognition programs that consistently deliver the intended results. Manage a successful transition to a new compensation plan and build efficient administration systems to support your plan. Every year, corporations spend $200 billion compensating their sales forces, with extremely mixed results. Make sure every dollar you spend is helping to achieve your goal of creating an empowered, effective sales force that drives your company's success. Packed with ready-to-use formulas and assessment tools and a wealth of insights from frontline sales managers and executives, The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation is your hands-on, easy-to-read playbook for crucially important decisions.