Rapidly changing technology and shifting demographics have altered the way your customers want to shop and buy. The realities of today's marketplace require a new look at your sales compensation plan, methods for reaching younger buyers and approach to the traditional field sales role.
The following articles from MDM will give you the tools you need to revamp your sales strategy and ensure you're keeping pace with customer demands.
1. How Sales Comp Can Drive Sales Growth – Because customers are buying differently, it is time to reassess how your sales compensation supports – or competes with – your company’s sales goals. This article details a presentation that Mike Emerson of Indian River Consultant Group delivered at the Sales GPS 2017 Executive Workshop, where he examined common challenges to aligning compensation with company goals and provides options for overcoming those challenges. “All of us are feeling pressure to allow (customers) to buy from us the way they want to buy,” Emerson says. “But we’re confronted with the reality that the way we pay salespeople could potentially be an obstacle.”
2. Selling to the Next Generation – You may have tailored your office culture and training processes to accommodate more millennials in the workplace, but have you considered how you’re selling to the next generation? More millennials are in B2B buying positions, and they shop and buy differently than preceding generations. “It might be a baby boomer-dominated industry," says Cam Marston, whose company Generational Insights helps clients understand generational change and its impact on the workplace and marketplace. "But the evidence is clear that it won’t last very long.”
3. MDM Special Report: The Sales Gorilla in the Room – In this series, Mike Marks of Indian River Consulting Group outlines the way customers are buying and how that has affected the traditional role, function and purpose of the distributor field salesperson. Marks explains what’s driving the shift, why distributors should act and what field sales looks like in the future. "The traditional self-directed field sales rep has become the 800-pound gorilla in the room, wielding power far beyond the impact he or she has on the top lines of most of today’s distributors," Marks says.
