The Harvard Business Review Sales Management Handbook: How to Lead High-Performing Sales Teams
Prabhakant Sinha, Arun Shastri, and Sally E. Lorimer
Harvard Business Review Press (October 2022)

How effective sales management consistently achieves extraordinary results

What makes this book so impressive — and so valuable — is the fact that almost any sales management program in almost any organization can be improved substantially by comparing and contrasting its components with those provided in the Harvard Business Review Sales Management Handbook, then adopt and adapt whatever is most relevant to the given needs.

“The key driver of change in sales organizations today is digital, a term we use broadly to mean the use of technology, data, and analytics to design and support business processes and decisions. Digital has already led customers to become increasingly knowledgeable and self-reliant and to have higher Expectations. Concurrently, sales organizations are leveraging evolving technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), to streamline processes and enable more-informed decision-making. And companies are engaging customers through digital channels and more-immersive digital experiences.”

Prabhakant Sinha, Arun Shastri, and Sally E. Lorimer focus on five groups of decisions, processes, and resources that comprise high-performance sales organizations: Customer Strategy, Organizational Design, Talent, Customer Engagement, and Technology. Sales leadership roles range from head of sales to frontline manager, and the number of jobs in between varies with the size of the given sales force. Sede Table 1-1, Page 5.

They carefuly  organize their material within Four Sections.  They explain HOW TO achieve strategic objectives that include these:

o Link sales leadership to execution and results
o Drive and support salespeople’s success with support of their collaboration with customers
o Conduct hiring and onboarding with speed to help achieve high-impact
o Empower salespeople with continuous learning development to accelerate their professional growth
o Manage performance to drive aforementioned high-impact results
o Motivate sales teams with appropriate goals, incentives,  and rewards
o Manage retention and turnover rather than become compliant with it
o Leverage the growing power of digital in sales management

Sinha, Shastri, and Lorimer wrote the Harvard Business Review Sales Management Handbook to help those who read it to navigate the complex and ever-shifting world of sales management — a world that balances the digitally accelerated future and the time-honored fundamentals of building relationships, delivering value, and earning trust. “The book shares easy-to-use decision frameworks and dozens of examples and lessons learned from organizations at the leading edge of the journey. Any reader — whether they are a new sales manager, an experienced sales executive, or a director of sales operations — will come away with tangible ideas they can put to work right away to lead to high-performance teams.”

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading Harvard Business Review Sales Management Handbook: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines).

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.