In the classic film “The Wizard of Oz” Dorothy leaves the grey world of depression-era Kansas and lands in the gleaming Technicolor world of Oz, where she begins a journey down the yellow brick road. Along the way she meets a mix of characters, and takes time to learn about and reflect on each one’s needs and goals. Watching this old favorite reminded me of a key challenge sales reps now face—as reps seek to broaden customers’ perception of value, it brings them into contact with a greater number and variety of stakeholders across the organization. MORE >>

It’s budget season, and with that comes that annual ritual of making business cases for various investments.  I’ve gotten quite a few requests lately about the ROI of skill development initiatives…everything from the overall impact of training/development in general to more specific questions about the impact that comes from very specific types of training (such as account planning or presentation skills). These questions are difficult to answer directly for a number of reasons.  Ongoing coaching also impacts return on development efforts.  MORE >>

Heads of Sales Ops made a curious decision back in 2008 during the depths of the Great Recession.  Facing a precarious budget situation, leaders had to decide how best to survive despite having limited tools to measure their function’s own effectiveness, which hampered efforts to make a business case for maintaining (let alone growing) resources. Conventional wisdom might have assumed the best strategy for Sales Ops was to close ranks, specializing in core areas like process, tools, and data analysis.  At first glance, evidence seems to confirm this as the direction most companies chose.  MORE >>

(This is a guest post by Anna Bird of the Marketing Leadership Council , our sister program for heads of Marketing.). As the function responsible for the moment of intersection between markets and products, services, and brands, Marketing is under intense pressure to adapt – not only to the ways customers want information, but also to the increasing ubiquity of data. Want to develop a more agile team? Read on for some tips gleaned from our conversations: 1) Develop a T-shaped workforce. These are employees with one deep area of expertise, but also a wider breadth of skills/knowledge.  MORE >>

As many Sales Executive Council members know, we’ve been hard at work on a book about our Challenger research.  It’s been an exhausting (but rewarding) 10 months since we first finalized the agreement with our publisher (Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Group USA) and began putting pen to paper. Now, with all of the T’s crossed and I’s dotted, we’re just waiting for hard copies to arrive and are looking forward to November 10 th , when the book officially goes on sale. Really, at the end of the day, there are three things that drove us to do this:  . 1) We think this stuff is important. MORE >>