Recommended audience

sales leaders and managers, business development directors, commercial directors, heads of sales

Type of audience

UK and International

Description

This webinar is a unique opportunity to learn about the latest research in performance measurement and management. As a sales leader, setting targets and enhancing sales effectiveness will probably be your number one priority. This webinar will inform and provide evidence-based insights to precisely do that.

Most sales organisations use revenue-to-target as the gold standard to measure sales performance. This indicator is easy to capture and purportedly unbiased and objective. Therefore, it is widely used as a basis for incentive compensation, often strongly influencing salespeople's behaviour and customer outcomes. Over-reliance on using revenue-to-target and other financial indicators to measure sales performance has several non-obvious but crucial shortcomings that sales leaders need to be aware of and address: (1) the disconnection between sales forecasts and budget cycles. (2) The distortion that historical performance data can introduce in setting future quotas. (3) The tendency to "game" the system by adopting opportunistic behaviours "to make the number". These are issues found in several sales organisations. We propose an integrated approach to design sales performance measurement systems. This approach considers measures that capture both performance and performing in sales execution and address three underlying dimensions of performance: effectiveness, efficiency, and competency.

Key takeaways

• Insights that explain why current sales performance measurement systems are often limited.
• Guidelines to design a 'high performing' performance measurement system.
• A set of principles to align sales measures with financial indicators.

CPD Points

CPD Points: Two (when attending live) or one (watching the recording)

Presenters

Peter Kerr, associate professor and the chair of applied research in sales, University of New Brunswick, Canada

Peter Kerr is an associate professor and the chair of applied research in sales, University of New Brunswick, Canada, and visiting fellow Cranfield School of Management. Peter Kerr is a former senior executive with over 25 years of strategic planning, product management, marketing, and sales management experience across several industries. His career has spanned both high growth and declining markets, regulated and unregulated industries, product, and service-based organizations and, most notably, the B2B technology sector where he was vice-president of marketing for Bell Canada's small and medium business division, director of marketing for Q9 Networks, Canada's largest data centre service provider and director of marketing for Dell Computer Corp's leasing division. He has published influential research in the Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing and the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management. Peter_Kerr@cbu.ca

Javier Marcos, professor of strategic sales management and negotiation at Cranfield School of Management

Javier Marcos is professor of strategic sales management and negotiation at Cranfield School of Management. Javier is an inspiring management educator, researcher and consultant with 25 years of experience working in academia, consultancy and in multinational corporations, having delivered programmes for more than 120 clients globally on strategic negotiation, professional selling, sales leadership and key account management. He was the director of custom programmes, executive education, and senior faculty at the University Cambridge, Judge Business School. He has published influential research in the Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management and Management Learning amongst others. Prior to his career in academia, he worked for Unilever and Novartis. Javier.marcos-cuevas@cranfield.ac.uk