Senior leaders have great confidence in their ability to develop innovations, say the authors, but not in their ability to commercialize them. This may result from a lack of formal processes and effective talent-management strategies. Steenburgh and Ahearne suggest a new approach: Assess the skills of your salespeople systematically. Train them for knowledge and resilience rather than focusing on a product's bells and whistles. Create a psychological profile of the ideal buyer. And assign strategic account managers to your most important customers. When new products are launched, the authors write, the best companies are strategically aligned, from the sales force to the C-suite. HR creates competency maps and works with sales managers to establish training and coaching programs. Frontline sales managers support the learning process that their reps go through in the field. And top leaders make sure that pressure to meet earnings targets doesn't stand in the way of future growth.

No sales force consists entirely of stars; sales staffs are usually made up mainly of solid performers, with smaller groups of laggards and rainmakers. Though most compensation plans approach these three groups as if they were the same, research shows that each is motivated by something different. By accounting for those differences in their incentive programs, companies can coax better performance from all their salespeople. As the largest cadre, core performers typically represent the greatest opportunity, but they're often ignored by incentive plans. Contests with prizes that vary in nature and value (and don't all go to stars) will inspire them to ramp up their efforts, and tiered targets will guide them up the performance curve. Laggards need quarterly bonuses to stay on track; when they have only annual bonuses, their revenues will drop 10%, studies show. This group is also motivated by social pressure--especially from new talent on the sales bench. Stars tend to get the most attention in comp plans, but companies often go astray by capping their commissions to control costs. If firms instead remove commission ceilings and pay extra for overachievement, they'll see the sales needle really jump. The key is to treat sales compensation not as an expense to rein in but as a portfolio of investments to manage. Companies that do this will be rewarded with much higher returns.

The key account manager of an engineering company has to convince a department to give up important contracts. The German engineering company Siemens had set up a global key account management program since 2010. The key account manager of an emerging account had been asked from his customer to cut the costs of two long-term contracts worth about €300 million that his customer had signed with Siemens. Although legally Siemens could refuse the revision, such an act could jeopardize Siemens' relationship with the customer. At the same time, a change in the contracts would bring about losses for Siemens. How should the key account manager handle this problem? He knew that he would have to be resourceful, given that he had no direct authority in the situation, but this was the nature of his job.