The Sales Management Association

Sales Management Association Case Study: Schlumberger Oilfield Services

Key Account Profiling as a Strategy Development Tool

For large sales organizations, account profiling is an essential sales force planning activity. Account profiles offer a summary view of customers’ (or prospects’) characteristics and key issues, often providing the single most important sales force-to-management communication tool for customer issues.

Like many firms that employ account profiles, Schlumberger Oilfield Services, a US$25 billion oilfield technology services and solutions firm, recognized a limitation in their profiling methodology: it focused on financial metrics that often provided little insight into the quality of the customer relationship.

This SMA Case Study describes the Schlumberger’s Account Relationship Profiling tool, an account planning platform that provided Schlumberger management with improved customer intelligence and enhanced account strategy for Schlumberger’s account teams.

Sales and Sales Management Competencies

Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Competency-Based Management Programs for the Sales Organization

Many organizations use competency-based management programs as an over-arching framework for managing talent. Competency-based management programs did not originate in the sales force, nor is their application unique to sales management. Using competency-based programs in managing the sales organization yields significant benefits to many firms, and we believe it offers enormous potential to sales and human resources leadership keen to establish a competitive advantage based on their sales organizations.

Competency management programs allow companies to improve recruiting, employee development, performance management, and succession planning. Among competency programs’ benefits to sales and sales management personnel: answering with clarity the questions “What does success in our organization look like?” and “What kind of behaviors and performance matter?” Such clarity focuses training and coaching in ways that boost return on investment, employee morale, and sales force productivity.

This SMA Research Brief provides an overview of competency modeling as a sales management discipline, while detailing how sales management in leading firms use competency models to drive sales force performance. Additional related content from the Sales Management Association: our competency dictionary, example performance review, example job description with sales position-specific competencies, and example candidate interview guide.

Sales and Sales Management Competency Dictionary, version 1.0

The Sales Management Association’s Sales and Sales Management Competency Dictionary is designed as a resource for firms developing competency models for their sales organizations. It draws upon commonly used competency descriptions used by sales organizations in defining the knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors associated with high-performing salespeople, sales managers, and sales support personnel.

The Sales Management Association’s sales compensation resources include our library of pay plan templates, viewable here . Each plan is presented in a downloadable spreadsheet template, which members can use to adapt a selected pay plan design to a sales position’s specific pay and performance requirements.

The Sales Management Association also uses interactive flash-based calculators that can be displayed on a website, presented in Powerpoint, or emailed. They provide a hands-on, at-a-glance summary of plan specifics, and allow users to model payouts at various levels of performance. An example plan dashboard is viewable by clicking here , or by clicking the illustration above.

New plan design spreadsheet templates and interactive calculators are posted to the library regularly.

Sales Force Job Descriptions Library

TheSales Management Association has added new jobdescriptions to its salesforce job descriptions library. Each job description includes detailedjob responsibilities, accountabilities and performance measures,organizational alignment, and suggested qualifications.

Our members find these job descriptions useful as a starting point whencustomizing their own sales organization's job descriptions. The SalesForce Job Descriptions Library is organized based on general job rolecategories, such as account management, business development, salesmanagement, and sales support.

Access the job descriptions library here.

Are You Selling the Way Your Prospects Want to Buy?

Aligning Sales Process with Buyers’ Expectations

Staffing the sales function with sales representatives that have broadly defined “selling” skills is no guarantee of success. It may not even be enough to deploy sellers with skills adapted to the unique markets they compete in.

Sales forces with the best likelihood of success are those that know when, where, and with whom to apply their market-appropriate selling skills. How do sales organizations know “when”, “where”, and “with whom” to engage? They carefully align their sales processes to buyers’ expectations.

By analyzing buyer behavior and preferred buying processes, sales forces can craft sales processes that have the best chance of success in their unique marketplace. In this article, author and practicing sales manager Wayne Gillikin outlines a unique and practical way to ensure your sales force is selling in sync with how your customers and prospects expect to buy.

A Study of How Sales Managers Spend Their Time

Judging sales managers’ effectiveness is not a simple matter. The sales management role – like the sales positions it manages – grows ever more complex, demanding, and diverse. In many firms, sales managers’ responsibilities change more dynamically than any other comparable management position, often in response to urgent realignments of market, growth, or customer priorities. Given these realities, there is no single metric or yardstick by which leadership can gauge the effectiveness of their sales management corps.

That said, any exercise in measuring sales management quality should include a review of sales managers’ time allocation. This study demonstrates correlation between the time managers spend in critical sales management activities and positive growth results. Based on a research effort conducted with the assistance of Growth Solutions LLC, a leading sales effectiveness consultancy, and the responses of more than 300 participants, the study attempts to establish meaningful baseline data on typical sales management time allocation, and the breadth and scope of the sales management role in participating firms.

How High-Performing Sales Organizations Rigorously Link Performance Claims to the Metrics That Matter Most to Customers

Tom Knight
Axiom Consulting Partners

Sales forces find it more difficult than ever to get their message heard in a cluttered and competitive marketplace. In the consumer packaged goods industry alone, 60,000 new products were introduced to grocery store buyers since 2000 – each with presentation materials that average 16 pages apiece. That’s 960,000 pages of “stuff” thrown at buyers, who are understandably forced to tune out all but the most compelling pitches.

But companies can prepare their sales forces to sell in today’s environment. The key is to communicate the full value of their firms’ offering in ways that buyers can truly hear and act on. Effective sales organizations do this not simply by quantifying their products’ and services’ value – but by doing so within the context of what matters most to buyers: the economic drivers of profit relevant to the customer’s firm. Advantage dramatically accrues to sales organizations who demonstrate value in this fashion – particularly if the economic drivers of a customers’ business are changing.

How do firms build this discipline into their sales forces? In this paper, Axiom Consulting Partners’ Tom Knight suggests the blueprint begins with:

Educating the sales force to weave key performance claims into compelling statements for each specific buyer and influencer; and
Ensuring that the sales force starts the sales process early enough and high enough in the customer’s organization to make a difference.

Using illustrative process diagrams, diagnostic tools, and case examples, this paper explores how high-performing sales organizations make impactful performance claims, craft compelling value statements, and connect their firms’ offerings with customers’ economic priorities.

What is Lean Six-Sigma, and Why Should Sales Management Care?

Lean Six Sigma is a management method used by manufacturing companies and service organizations to improve business performance. It’s the lens through which many firms look at how they define, measure, analyze, improve, and control the things they do, make, and deliver to customers. In doing so, they apply Lean Six Sigma principals to internal processes and to their interactions with vendors. For sales forces calling into such organizations, speaking the language of Lean Six Sigma becomes a competitive necessity.

In this article, Six Sigma expert Michael Webb unravels the seemingly arcane jargon and statistical concepts that underlie Lean Six Sigma, while illustrating how the Six Sigma’s principles can be applied to sales process and sales force management.

Based on joint research conducted by The Sales Management Association and Growth Solutions LLC, this study reveals how sales managers spend their time.

As a companion piece to the SMA Research Brief on Improving Sales Managers' Effectiveness, these Powerpoint slides provide greater detail on study findings and recommendations.

Non-members can view an abbreviated version of the slide presentation through the Sideshare viewer at right. Members are able to view the complete presentation, and download islides n either PDF or Powerpoint format, after logging in.

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