ABSTRACT
Research into sales leadership highlights that the sales leader is required to manage complex customer portfolios and inspire flexible sales teams to deliver the performance required to fulfil their organisation's objectives effectively. To understand how sales excellence can be achieved sales leaders will need to become skilled in employing automated systems such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), managing virtual environments, and hybrid sales teams. However, the effectiveness of CRM systems relies on a successful introduction of the system and sales leaders need training in how to understand the outputs. Another key aspect of sales management will be the recruitment of appropriate salespeople with the skills and attributes that will be required in the new selling environments. Consequently, salespeople will need agile leadership and focused training to enable them to develop new sales methods and behaviours to strike a balance between virtual and traditional sales activities.
