MANAGEMENT


Organizing, Developing, and Motivating Your Sales Talent


HEATHER BALDWIN THE PEOPLE PRINCIPLE


Sales management is all about people. Whatever your goals as a manager – whether successfully launching a new product, transitioning to a more consultative selling approach, or any other major shift – you need the right people with the right skills to pull it off. Sure, training can help you mold behavior, but no amount of instruction will trans- form an outgoing, chatty relationship-builder into an introspective analytical whiz. When you need one type of person for sales success, you need to hire that person from the outset.


Here’s where things get more compli- cated. Imagine you’ve hired the right people for your sales organization – but then the strategy of the organiza- tion changes. To successfully execute the new strategy, you’ll need sales reps with abilities and experiences that are very different from the ones your team possesses today. Obvi- ously, firing everyone and starting again is not an option. Nor is blindly keeping everyone on your team and hoping they’ll be able to pull off the new strategy with a bit of training. So what would you do?


When a specialty pharmaceutical company based in Europe faced this situation as it decided to grow one of its small divisions in the U.S., here’s what happened.


The division, which sold drugs for oncology patients, contributed just 10 to 15 percent of the company’s total U.S. sales. The remaining 85 to 90 percent of sales came from a family of drug products designed to help dermatology patients.


SELLING POWER JULY 2018 | 11 © 2018 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.


HKEITA / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38