Sales Effectiveness Breakfast Event Series: Friday 12 November 2010

Is it possible to keep up with market changes and still reward our salespeople appropriately?

We know that all sales roles aren’t created equal.  For example, the knowledge, skills and abilities to perform a sales role in the FMCG world is quite different to a salesperson building the relationships needed to engage buyers in multi-million dollar communications solutions.  One’s not “better” than the other – just different.  And they need different types of sales people – and, to achieve optimum performance – these sales people need to be rewarded differently.

Over the past few years, Hewitt International has been building a research base to provide a framework for understanding the complexity that is professional selling.  In this session, a senior consultant from Hewitt Associates will outline the characteristics of salespeople and sales roles that have emerged as the research base of over 25,000 salespeople has helped them establish and build a taxonomy of sales roles, and how this taxonomy can be used to determine appropriate reward structures.

Examples of matching sales rewards to different sales taxonomies will be presented.

Based on this wealth of coaching experience, Michelle will share her ideas about changes occurring in professional selling and sales management.  A few of the questions she will cover in this session include:

• Do we focus too much on sales process and methodology?
• What tribes do salespeople need to succeed?
• What can city based salespeople learn from regional salespeople – and vice-versa?
• Do generational differences – and gender – have an impact on sales performance?

Michelle has also recently commenced some preliminary research into some of these emerging trends in professional selling and will share some initial findings from this research.

In this final breakfast session for 2010, Michael Schiffner and his team from Collective Intelligence will talk about the paradox of sales training and outline a framework and process that will help sales teams move from a “training” culture to a “development & performance” culture, which delivers long-term changes in sales behaviours to help achieve sustainable performance improvement.

During this compelling session, Michael & Robin will highlight why sales training in isolation doesn’t work – and offer evidence and research to support their view.  They will then discuss the following essential elements required to move to a culture of sales development:

• understanding the negative patterns that prevent real sales development
• what the new sales culture looks like and how to achieve it
• why salespeople require a different learning methodology
• the reasons people and organisations really change
• the critical role sales leaders play in getting it right