Book Review: Sales Management

Book Review by Mike Evans

On Selling Management by Spider Lockhart & Ulrich Herter
Arbor Eight Publishing, 2008. ISBN 13: 978-0-61524693-2

This book is about sales management. It describes a series of techniques dubbed the PATH that can be used to organize, measure and motivate a sales force.  The PATH is an engineering approach to sales management with a strong focus on metrics and objective judgement.  This book is neither about implementing CRM nor about personal selling techniques, such as solution selling; rather it complements an organisation using any of these techniques to support the obtainment of new business.

The book begins with chapters on the PATH system and how to use customer input to establish where each prospect is on the sales pipeline.  The next chapters deal with applying the techniques to different kinds of selling, from direct business to business sales through to retail selling.  The final set of chapters cover ancillary sales management issues such as financial forecasting.

I am generally easily bored by books containing “new” sales systems that offer to improve my business.  The problem is that they turn out not to be new.  However, I liked this book which did contain new ideas by taking the perspective of the sales manager rather than the sales representative.  My only criticism of the text is that the description of the example company – GIST – following the PATH is a little wooden.  I felt that the readability of the book would have increased if more of the content had been in the context of this example rather than as a tutorial.