Review: Sales Management (Parts II & III) – Robert Calvin

January 13, 2011

The attendees of this week’s Sales Forum had to face approximately two feet of snow here in Boston yesterday. For those of you lucky enough to avoid the abysmal weather, here is the conclusion to last week’s review of Sales Management.

Title: Sales Management

Author: Robert J Calvin

Edition: 2001

Presentation:
Organization & Readability are the same as before, though Part II is more difficult to skim.

Content:
Part II – Strategy and the Firm

Part II focuses on how to organize your sales force and motivate them to perform.

Calvin provides worksheets to help sales managers determine what type of sales organization they want to build and how they want the architecture within that organization to look. He forces the reader to ask him or herself a number of questions. For example: Is your business more suited to channel sales or direct sales? In what instances do the costs outweigh the benefits? Does it make more sense to organize your sales people by market segment or geography? What are the disadvantages of each option?

Calvin also delves into the more nuanced challenges of organizational planning, asking whether managers are looking closely at how sales teams are divvying up their time and attention to each market and territory as well as whether sales forecasts are realistic or biased.

Calvin’s motivational section focuses on values and positive reinforcement, and strongly resembles Aubry Daniels’ Bringing Out the Best in People.

Part III – Perfecting the Program

The last part of Calvin’s book is split between Performance Evaluations and Sales Force Automation chapters. This section is valuable because it stresses the difference between results and the activities, skills, and knowledge that lead to those results. With sales people, it’s very easy to measure results, but if an organization focuses only on that one metric, they lose the opportunity to improve their existing sales organization.

Because the book is presently 10 years old, I chose not to examine the Sales Force Automation section, as CRM software has evolved greatly in the intervening decade.

Applicability to expansion stage firms:

At times, Calvin offers great tips and asks highly pertinent questions. Overall, however, I think Calvin’s book is most applicable to the expansion stage firm when the firm’s sales organization (or the sales organization it is building) is primarily theoretical. Calvin doesn’t really address how sales organizations play into business growth strategies nor does he address the specific challenges your sales organization faces when you are scaling a business.

Er-Si An helps to identify qualified investment opportunities for OpenView.