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The article presents the authors' views on the need for an effective business leader to act as an intermediary between information technology (IT) and sales and marketing departments in order to successfully implement technology initiatives. The authors have designated this business leader a "boundary spanner," given their experience in, and capacity to empathize with, both the commercial and IT mindsets. Topics include how boundary spanners enable success, an example of a boundary spanner in action, and recent trends in boundary-spanning talent.

In many organizations, marketing investment-level decisions precede the associated resource allocation decisions and are based on market-level sales response data, often with no attention to the impact of rules used to allocate resources to submarkets. Such top-down budgeting is commonly based on a perception that aggregate sales and profitability are affected much more by the level than by the alloction of the investment. The authors analyze the effects of different resource allocation rules assuming alternative specifications of submarket sales response functions and show that allocation decisions significantly influence aggregate sales response functions, investment-level decisions based on these functions, and realized profit. The authors also show aggregate sales and profit are usually more sensitive to improvements in allocation rules than to increases in investment levels and conclude that resource allocation decisions warrant more attention in marketing budgeting. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

For more than three decades, Andris Zoltners, now an emeritus professor at Northwestern, has been studying the best ways to organize and pay salespeople. The pioneer of sales analytics, he is the founder of one of the world’s largest sales consulting firms and the author of six books on sales management. In this interview, he shares some of his insights with HBR. Companies make several common mistakes with sales compensation, Zoltners notes: over- or underincentivizing key products, setting quotas too high or too low, and underpaying top performers or overpaying people with good territories. Companies often get the proportion of incentive pay wrong, too, because they fail to account for “free sales”—residual sales they get nearly automatically. They may think they’re paying 60% in salary and 40% in commissions, but if their salespeople have a lot of free sales, commissions could be closer to 15%. Overly complicated plans are also a problem. Some plans have different payments for dozens of objectives. That’s too much; salespeople can focus on only four or five goals at most. Yet a bigger issue may be an overreliance on compensation in the first place, Zoltners suggests. There are other drivers of sales success—the people you hire, their managers, the design of territories. And while analytics are a useful tool, culture may prove to be an even better one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At one company, the account transition process had key personnel from the reassigned customer meet with the prior salesperson, the newly assigned salesperson, and the sales manager in a series of structured review and planning meetings. When current salespeople give up accounts (and therefore sales opportunity), we routinely hear salespeople complain: "They took away some of my best accounts. By Andris A. Zoltners, PK Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer Published on HBR.org / May 03, 2021 / Reprint H06A1E jansucko/Getty Images Faced with shrinking markets and digitally-savvy buyers who rely less on help from salespeople, some companies are downsizing their sales forces. [Extracted from the article]