What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation


Book Description

Mark Donnolo applies years of firsthand knowledge as a leading sales consultant for Fortune 500 companies to address the tough questions leaders should be asking. Featuring real lessons from the field and valuable thought models, What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation enlightens you about how miscomprehension at the higher levels leads to fundamental misalignments between sales strategy and organizational goals. Insights from C-level executives showcase that the way a company designs its sales compensation program has a greater impact on behavior and results than any sales training, sales management method, or leadership message. Most tangibly, the book’s expert Revenue Roadmap identifies the four major competency areas and sixteen related disciplines that must connect for an organization to grow profitably: Insight Sales Strategy Customer Coverage Enablement By striking a happy balance between overcompensation and under compensation, your sales plan will gain the momentum needed to power the performance of the entire business.




What Your CEO Needs to Know about Sales Compensation


Book Description

Featuring insightful interviews with Fortune 1000 C-level executives and real lessons from the field, this essential book reveals the tough questions leaders should be asking about how sales incentives drive the business.




The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation


Book Description

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. 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. 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 or demoralizing salespeople by having difficult goals 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. Filled 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.




Essential Account Planning


Book Description

Sales growth starts with planning Sales accounts are harder than ever to win, let alone keep. Globalization, cloud computing, and crowdsourcing create a marketplace where any account can be lured away by a hungry startup. And the face-time advantage? Forget it. Today's high-quality sale will likely involve six or more decision makers. That's why it's time to get strategic about how sales teams frame their approach. In Essential Account Planning, sales enablement expert Mark Donnolo blends his years of experience with expert interviews and stories to show you how planning can reliably drive revenue. His five-point framework will prepare you to address the arguments you're certain to hear against account planning, such as lack of commitment, ownership, and time. Each sales organization is unique, but most have similar challenges and succeed using common principles. And chances are, sales reps in your company already perform many of these account planning tasks, albeit on the fly or independent of others. This book's ready-to-use tools and templates will help you get everyone on the same page to deliver immediate results. In this book, you'll learn how to: Develop a consistent account plan structure. Create the habits and culture of an ongoing planning process. Navigate the politics that impede information sharing. Many salespeople believe that more selling creates more sales, but the salespeople who invest in account planning become the true sales leaders. Use Essential Account Planning to bring stability to your sales organization and start seeing the rewards of planning today!




Compensating the Sales Force: A Practical Guide to Designing Winning Sales Compensation Plans


Book Description

Compensating the Sales Force is a uniquely jargon-free, how-to guide to all major sales compensation concepts and formulas. Using real-world examples, guru David J. Cichelli: Helps readers select the right compensation strategy for their firm Provides step-by-step guidance to implementing various approaches Simplifies the mathematical formulas that are a thorn in most manager's side




Quotas!


Book Description

Every quota challenge has a story. Sales quotas aren’t all about the numbers. Quotas! Using Design Thinking to Solve Your Biggest Sales Challenge sheds new light on quota challenges, the story behind them, and the methods to solve them. Many organizations struggle to reach effective, market-driven sales quotas, with more than half reporting quota setting as one of their top sales dilemmas. Instead of wrestling over the number, author Mark Donnolo contends that organizations can better achieve effective sales quotas by applying a problem-solving approach. With decades of experience working with major organizations on successful sales strategies, he offers engaging stories embedded with business problems and poses challenge questions to prompt a creative, five-step design-thinking process. Chapters feature quota design frameworks and a range of applicable, scalable methods. You’ll also find rare, expert guidance through the candid perspectives and advice of CEOs and other senior leaders. This book is a must-read for those who help set quotas as well as those who fulfill them.




Aligning Strategy and Sales


Book Description

"The best sales book of the year" — strategy+business magazine That gap between your company’s sales efforts and strategy? It’s real—and a huge vulnerability. Addressing that gap, actionably and with attention to relevant research, is the focus of this book. In Aligning Strategy and Sales, Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes equips you to link your go-to-market initiatives with strategic goals. Cespedes offers a road map to articulate strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and that will fuel the behaviors required for profitable growth. Without that alignment, leaders will press for better execution when they need a better strategy, or change strategic direction with great cost and turmoil when they should focus on the basics of sales execution. With thoughtful, clear, and engaging examples, Aligning Strategy and Sales provides a framework for diagnosing and managing the core levers available for effective selling in any organization. It will give you the know-how and tools to move from ideas to action and build a sales effort linked to your firm’s unique goals, not a generic selling formula. Cespedes shows how sales efforts affect all elements of value creation in a business, whether you’re a start-up seeking to scale or an established firm looking to jump-start new growth. The book provides key insights to optimize your firm’s customer management activities and so improve selling and strategy.




Pay Without Performance


Book Description

The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders. Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives. This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.




The Sales Acceleration Formula


Book Description

Use data, technology, and inbound selling to build a remarkable team and accelerate sales The Sales Acceleration Formula provides a scalable, predictable approach to growing revenue and building a winning sales team. Everyone wants to build the next $100 million business and author Mark Roberge has actually done it using a unique methodology that he shares with his readers. As an MIT alum with an engineering background, Roberge challenged the conventional methods of scaling sales utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which he was trained to see the world. In this book, he reveals his formulas for success. Readers will learn how to apply data, technology, and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand. As SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services for software company HubSpot, Mark led hundreds of his employees to the acquisition and retention of the company's first 10,000 customers across more than 60 countries. This book outlines his approach and provides an action plan for others to replicate his success, including the following key elements: Hire the same successful salesperson every time — The Sales Hiring Formula Train every salesperson in the same manner — The Sales Training Formula Hold salespeople accountable to the same sales process — The Sales Management Formula Provide salespeople with the same quality and quantity of leads every month — The Demand Generation Formula Leverage technology to enable better buying for customers and faster selling for salespeople Business owners, sales executives, and investors are all looking to turn their brilliant ideas into the next $100 million revenue business. Often, the biggest challenge they face is the task of scaling sales. They crave a blueprint for success, but fail to find it because sales has traditionally been referred to as an art form, rather than a science. You can't major in sales in college. Many people question whether sales can even be taught. Executives and entrepreneurs are often left feeling helpless and hopeless. The Sales Acceleration Formula completely alters this paradigm. In today's digital world, in which every action is logged and masses of data sit at our fingertips, building a sales team no longer needs to be an art form. There is a process. Sales can be predictable. A formula does exist.




The Innovative Sale


Book Description

When it comes to strategies, salespeople usually veer toward one of two extremes: operating analytically...or by the seat of their pants. In this groundbreaking book on sales creativity, readers will learn how to integrate the right-brain aptitude for innovation with the left-brain affinity for logic and process. The result is a fresh, dynamic approach that addresses customers' needs while expanding the salesperson's entire way of thinking. Packed with real-life examples and powerful principles, The Innovative Sale reveals how to: * Define the sales challenge * Question assumptions and look for ways to reframe the problem * Mine unrelated situations for fresh solutions * Get comfortable with feeling lost as you explore new directions * Break some rules and learn to "grow with the flow" The Innovative Sale draws on the work of pioneering geniuses in design, architecture, and the arts to help salespeople develop a predictable creative process. With the tools and tips of this game-changing book in hand, they'll unleash their own unique powers of intuition and innovation, and land more sales than ever before-in ways they never imagined possible.