As companies struggle to revitalize their growth, the importance of their sales programs is becoming even more critical.  Over the course of my career, I have observed that there is often a tendency for the sales organization and its senior leadership to be out of sync with the rest of the corporate strategy and the senior leadership team.  That situation has clear negative impact on the overall success of the enterprise.  It occurred to me that students at top business schools who will likely become the senior leadership team of their firms would benefit from a better grasp of the mission and operation of a sales organization.  They should understand the importance of a coherent go to market strategy that extends from the senior executive team to the most junior sales rep.

I believe most business programs do a good job of giving their students a strong working background in competitive positioning and marketing, but sometimes leave gaps in their graduates’ understanding of how companies actually execute their go-to-market strategies through their sales organizations.  I’ve had the privilege of working with the faculty of the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University for about ten years as the business recruiting team leader and later the campus manager for Hewlett-Packard’s relationship with Cornell.  I worked closely with senior marketing, operations and finance faculty to develop a workshop which gives business students an understanding of the charter and challenges of the sales organization, and its relationship with the other major functional organizations of an enterprise.  My goal was to give a business student sufficient understanding of sales strategy and operations to ask the right questions and to interact effectively with senior sales leadership.   I delivered the workshop at Cornell in February 2003 and received strong validation from the students as to its value for them and their overall preparation for business leadership.   Cornell has chosen to bring the program back for their 2004 Leadership Skills Program.  To give you a sense for the program as I delivered it at Cornell, I’ll clip in below the summary that we used to promote the workshop. 

I believe that this program would have similar value for other top tier business programs and I’m always interested in opportunities to present this program or a derivative to other business programs.  If you’re interested in bringing this program to your school, please drop me a line and we can discuss how to make it fit best with your program.   

I’m also anxious to receive other viewpoints on this topic, and the best ways to integrate this topic into a business degree program.  I’d love to hear from business educators on how they approach this topic in their classrooms, and how I can make this workshop more effective.

Your First Conversation with the VP of Sales

Sales is sometimes considered a black art, and often not given the status of a critical business process.  Every general manager should understand how sales programs are defined and executed, and how they link into the general strategy of the enterprise.  Specifically, they should understand the basics of:

·          Making the sales program coherent with and directly in support of the general business strategy of the enterprise.  They should understand key linkages into product marketing, marketing communications, and customer support functions.

·          Choosing a direct, indirect or hybrid go-to-market strategy.  This would include developing a direct sales geography and account coverage strategy, as well as an effective strategy to support any indirect channel.

·          Recruiting, developing and retaining a sales force and sales management team.  This would include the critical areas of compensation and recognition.

·          Measuring, managing and optimizing sales process effectiveness.

·          Building customer satisfaction and brand loyalty through effective account management programs. 

At the conclusion of this session, you will be able to engage a sales executive in a well informed conversation about their overall sales strategy, what factors they considered in its formulation, and the overall operational performance of the enterprise sales organization.