Since I started working at Prima Resource, I have had the opportunity to greatly improve my knowledge and skills in sales management. This has helped me discover certain aspects that I wish I knew when I was a sales manager and that would have completely changed the way I made some decisions in this role.

Among all that I learned, there is one fundamental element that really caught my attention and that definitely would have made all the difference: the importance of using specific evaluation tools for sales, such as Objective Management Group's evaluations. These tools make a huge difference in coaching salespeople and they would have made me a much better sales manager than I was.

A growing number of companies are looking to get their customer service department to start generating sales…

Not so long ago, customer service and the sales department were two worlds that very rarely overlapped. Now, with the emergence of the internet and online selling, the lines between their roles are becoming increasingly blurred.

Since bots now fulfil more and more support tasks, customer service is veering towards providing support to salespeople and, doing so, generating more sales. Consequently, a growing number of businesses wish to transform their customer service into a profit centre, instead of a cost centre.

Don't underestimate the difficulty of this endeavour.

The roles of a sales organization range from simple and diverse to specific and complex. The diversity and complexity of sales organizations tend to depend on the company's maturity and the number of markets it services.

Young companies follow a relatively basic business model, usually as a result of having fewer employees and a lower hiring budget than larger companies. Some smaller businesses try to mimic the structures of larger organizations which only adds unnecessary complexity. I usually recommend they simplify.