Compensating New Sales Roles: How to Design Rewards That Work in Today's Selling Environment

Challenging Issues: An Overview

Throughout this book, we point out that companies are changing the way they do business with customers. In many cases, they have redesigned sales and services processes to respond more quickly to customer requirements. Our premise is that nowhere are these changes more pronounced than in the sales function, where, in the main, the job of the individual seller is undergoing continuous change. Virtually no industry is immune from this change, and therefore new sales roles are emerging everywhere, in some industries more rapidly than others.

Consider this example: When Wal-Mart needed to find a way to distribute the multitude of manufacturer displays used in its stores, management talked with its shelving supplier, ...