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You know they’re important. HR is on your case about getting them done. But, they’re time consuming, uncomfortable, and disorganized. And as a manager, you have more important things to focus on right now.

We’re talking about the dreaded performance review.

They’re among the most underused levers for affecting behavior in most organizations. Reviews encourage people to play by the company rules, stop bad habits, set priorities, and clarify accountabilities owned by the rep versus the manager or the firm. Doing performance reviews well reinforces effective leadership skills.

I recently published my new book, Aligning Strategy and Sales, and its entire tenth chapter focuses on performance reviews. Pulling from that section, here’s a guide for what to do before, during, and after the review.

Read the full article on HubSpot.

An estimated 85 percent of companies in the United States use incentive plans, accounting for approximately 40 percent of total sales compensation. That’s a lot of money and managerial effort. Yet in a recent survey of 700 firms by CSO Insights, 20 percent reported that their compensation plans had “minimal or no impact on selling behavior,” 12 percent said they “do not know” about the impact of their plan and only 8.9 percent found their pay policy “consistently driving precise selling behavior.”

One reason for disconnects between incentives and salesperson behavior is that, in many firms, the people designing pay plans do so according to an obsolete vision of sales tasks. There’s no such thing as effective selling if that selling doesn’t link toyour firm’s strategy. To bridge this gap, businesses should adhere to the following when designing their compensation plans…

Read the full article on Business 2 Community.

The equivalent of an entire sales force is replaced at many firms every four years, so it’s critical that go-to-market initiatives remain tied to strategic goals. Frank Cespedes explains how in his book, Aligning Strategy and Sales.

Too often, there’s a huge gap between a company’s overall business strategy and the way its salesforce operates in the field. In fact, says Frank V. Cespedes, articles and books about strategy rarely take sales into consideration at all.

“Everybody talks about the importance of talent management,” says Cespedes, a senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School. “But far fewer confront a basic fact: Companies typically spend much more money and hire many more people, annually, in their sales function than they do anywhere else in the firm. At Google and Groupon, for instance, a higher percentage of employees work in sales than engineering or data mining. And at Facebook the salesforce’s ability to translate ‘likes’ into advertisers will make or break that company’s valuation and fortunes going forward.”

Read the full article and an excerpt from Aligning Strategy and Sales on Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.

The goal of strategy is profitable growth, meaning economic value above the firm’s cost of capital. There are basically four ways to create that value: (1) invest in projects that earn more than their cost of capital; (2) increase profits from existing capital investments; (3) reduce the assets devoted to activities that earn less than their cost of capital; and (4) reduce the cost of capital itself.

In my experience, most CEOs, CFOs, and other C-suite executives involved in strategy formulation know these finance basics. (Or, they learn fast after a few investor meetings.) But far fewer understand and operationalize the core sales factors that materially affect each value creation lever.

Read the full article on Harvard Business Review.

In the first decade of the 21st century, less than half of all startups in the U.S. survived beyond three years. And of the nearly 44,000 companies founded in 2000 and listed in the Capital IQ database, less than six percent achieved more than $10 million in revenues by 2010. As venture capitalist David Lee once said, “It’s never been easier to start a company and never harder to build one.”

One of the main reasons for this failure rate is entrepreneurs don’t identify their target demographic correctly. Without clarifying your core customers, selling is ultimately a function of individual, heroic efforts in the field, not a scalable platform for growth.

The following four steps can reverse this downward trend…

Read the full article on Entrepreneur.com.