Sales Force Design for Strategic Advantage

Written as a collaborative effort by three partners of ZS Associates, a sales force organization consulting firm, this book is impressive in its content, given the variety of subjects covered, the number and relevance of the illustrative examples cited and the precision with which the tools that it presents are described.
• The objective is ambitious, as the book attempts to present all of the parameters that must be taken into account in the sales force organization, and provide readers with a method to design the organization best adapted to their needs. A general outline of this approach is summarized in chapter 2.
• A first chapter convincingly explains why changes in the economic environment are forcing many companies to completely transform their commercialization methods.
• The explanations in chapters 3 and 4, devoted to defining an offering and selecting a market penetration strategy, are nothing really new, but perfectly summarize the objectives of this initial design phase.
• The second part of the book (chapters 5 to 8) covers practical topics that are rarely presented in such a thorough and well-developed fashion, such as deciding how specialized salespeople should be, structuring the sales force, sizing teams, defining the territory to assign to each salesperson, etc. For each of these topics, many methods and concrete case studies are presented in great detail with explanations that are easy to understand.
• The last chapter, devoted to sales force change management, provides a few good suggestions on a general level.