CEL Lab
Commercial Excellence LAB
CEL is involved in a mix of engaging activities created for its partners, as well as for the wider community of executives:
- Research and publications:
Annual research projects on cutting-edge issues in the sales domain Read more
Custom research projects for companies Read more
- Webinars, events, workshops and roundtables involving managers Read more
- Academic speeches at partner companies
- Speeches by international academics and meetings at partner companies with insights for managerial practice
- Guest speakers from partner companies from partner companies in national and international programs both at the university level (Bocconi University) and at the executive level (SDA Bocconi School of Management).
Research Topics
CEL generates knowledge to provide answers. Main research areas over time, selected and investigated together with our partners:
CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN SALES
- How to manage change and transformation projects in sales successfully?
- How to identify and manage dysfunctional behavior?
- Remote Selling how to navigate from the Covid-19 emergency to managing the new normale?
SALES COMPETENCE EVOLUTION
- Young talents: how do they see sales professionals' roles?
- How important are sales competences and experiences for a corporate career in the eyes of the C-suite?
- Which are the critical competences that salespeople or area managers cannot lack in order to succeed?
SALES TECHNOLOGY & DIGITAL TRASFORMATION
- How to manage digital transformation projects in sales successfully?
- How to stimulate the adoption of digital tools and sales content while increasing their impact on sales performance?
- How to craft and implement a digital sales trasformation plan?
- How to avoid technostress e stimulate technopower?
Research Plan 2016 - 2021
Annual Research Project: Mastering the New Normal in Sales Organizations
Research Goals and Outcomes:
Timing: March 2021 – February 2022
First Annual Research Project: COVID-19 and Remote Selling
Research Goals and Outcomes: Capture how sales networks reacted to the challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic by adopting remote selling tools (e.g., Skype, Teams, WebEx, Zoom...) in the interaction with their clients. The analysis focuses on:
- Behaviors: What did salespersons do? With which kind of clients did they adopt remote selling and to do what?
- Results: What conclusions do salespersons draw? How did remote selling change client interactions?
- Company support in implementing remote selling: What did the company manage well and what not, according to salespeople perceptions?
- Vision for the future: How and how much will salespersons continue using remote selling tools and channels? For which clients and for which activities? Which kind of support will be most relevant for the future?
Timing:March 2020 – February 2021
Second Annual Research Project: Selling at Coronavirus’ Times
Research Goals and Outcomes: Instant survey in collaboration with the student association JEME Bocconi, which highlighted that 71,2% of seller- and 82,9% of buyer-companies has implemented restrictive policies after the pandemic’s outbreak in Italy. Even before those restrictions were imposed by public authorities, sellers faced issues in visiting 60,1% of their clients and expected their turnover to fall by 22,1% (this estimate dropped even further to 41,1% after March 8th’s ministerial decree). Salespeople got immediately active and tried to intensify the use of technology, to the point that they claimed to be able to maintain relationships with 69,2% of those clients they weren’t able to contact in person anymore. So, before the government’s interventions, 39,9% of all clients could still be reached in person, while 42,2% was could only be reached via alternative means, such as the phone (30,3%) or e-mail (27,4%), or more advanced technologies, such as web conferences (13,5%), Skype calls (14,3%) and messaging systems (14,5%). 17,9% couldn’t be reached at all anymore. Only 15,6% of the sellers use all the tools, while the majority (58,3%) uses four of them. There is still room for improvement, since the remaining 26% uses two at maximum. This is important, because the findings show that the larger the number of alternative tools that companies use, the higher the likelihood to maintain client relationships, and thus limit a decrease in turnover. Indeed, the expected loss diminishes by 2,65% for each additional alternative tool used. Since digital tools are the ones less used, their employment becomes a powerful tool to limit the crisis more than ever before.
Timing: March 2020
Third Annual Research Project: COVID-19 Emergency Landscape
Research Goals and Outcomes: The Coronavirus emergency confirms the limited adoption of digital tools and technologies in buyer-seller interactions in the commercial context. Nonetheless, the emergency can represent a stimulus for fostering the commercial networks’ and processes’ digitalization, and find alternative ways to manage commercial relationships in the recovery phase. CEOs and managers of nine multinational companies, who met at a virtual roundtable on the topic COVID-19 EMERGENCY at SDA Bocconi’s CEL on April the 21st 2020, share this view. The event’s goal was to enable an exchange of views and experiences, in order to identify replicable managerial strategies and actions, as well as best practices, with respect to: How to keep and manage the client relationships in a moment characterized by relational freeze and social distancing? How to improve people’s motivation and engagement? There are eight interdependent areas, in which winning managerial actions have been identified: (1) Accelerate digitalizzazione; (2) Keep contact; (3) Listen to problems – identify priorities; (4) Think for innovating; (5) Give and take care; (6) Be a point of reference; (7) Offer concrete support to the own commercial networks; (8) Be selective.
Timing: April 2020
2019
Annual Research Project: Digital TrAction: Transformation in Action
Expected output and objectives of research
- The aim is to identify, analyse and model concrete example of companies’ practices in supporting and executing projects of sales transformation, thus creating the organizational conditions to overcome the barriers to changes linked to the Digital Commercial Transformation (DCT).
- The DCT research will explore the “sales process re-definition”, the “talent acquisition”, the “training & development”, the “process & performance evaluation”, the “motivation, rewards & compensation management”.
The research’s main outcome will be a collection of cases/experiences on critical issues faced by the companies, solutions implemented, insights, trends and key-learning points.
Timing: March – December 2019
2018
Annual research project: Digital commercial transformation plan
Expected output and objectives of research: Explore the sales processes that companies are transforming with a digital perspective, their strategic objectives, tools and organizational requirements. The quali-quantitative project also aims at providing ideas for how to design and refine a Digital Commercial Transformation Plan.
Timing: March 2018 – February 2019
2017
First Annual Research ProjectSales Content Management System
Research Goals and Outcomes:With the term «Sales Content Management System» we refer to all the content, organized in work tools, available to sales networks through the various channels and processes for carrying out sales activities. The research investigates:
- What content/tools are wanted, used and deemed useful by the salesforce for developing and managing sales relationships;
- What technology supports the management of information and how does it impact sales performances; what are the barriers to the use of content/tools in the various stages of sales processes and relationship management.
In doing so, the innovative Sales Content Management Barometer is created, an indicator able to measure and assess Quality, Knowledge, Use, and Management Capability of sales content management.
Timing: March 2017 – February 2018
Second Annual Research Project: Digital Social Selling
Expected output and objectives of research: Examine what social and digital tools are used and how often by salespersons and supervisors in their sales activities; what are the goals and results, and during what stages of sales processes. In answering these questions, the research created a Digital & Social Selling Index that can measure the use of tools, their relative capabilities and perceived impact on results (including with an internal and external benchmarking perspective).
The Digital & Social Selling Index research was awarded the first Sales Education Foundation award, in the Special Interest Group on Sales of the American Marketing Association.
Timing: March 2017 – February 2018
2016
Annual Research Project: Sales in the «Control Room»
Research Goals and Outcomes: Measure the perceptions of Italian executives on the role of Sales in businesses. In particular, identify which sales skills are considered strategic for their companies and useful for reaching leadership positions. Aspects analyzed:
- The importance of sales skills for the success of the company;
- The importance of sales skills and experience for the career of a manager;
- The skills developed in sales that are considered most important;
- What companies need in order to attract and keep talents in sales.
Timing: March 2016 – February 2017
Second Annual Research Project: Sales: A Wonderful Job? Perceptions and Perspectives of Sales Professions (Bocconi University in collaboration with CEL).
Research Goals and Outcomes: The research showed the perceptions and stereotypes associated with the role of salespersons. Then, experiences and visions about the future development of the profession of salesperson and management implications were debated.
Timing: March 2016 – February 2017
Third Annual Research Project: Extraordinary Salespeople: Necessary competences for commercial excellence - Research project in partnership with Bocconi University.
Research Goals and Outcomes: The relevance of competences as a critical performance element has, since the 1970s, increasingly become the foundation of human resource management systems. Competences’ weight is all the more critical, the more roles are considered to be in between the company and the outside market. So, what is investigated are the professional roes of salespeople and supervisors. In particular, the following research aims at understanding which are the skills that companies require today from their sales force and which are highlighted in the scientific and managerial literature as predictors of performance, in order to identify those critical for commercial excellence. The followed methodology started from the analysis and comparison of the company competency-models provided by the companies and from the data collection through two focus groups with groups of respondents represented by salespeople and supervisors (identified as best performers by the companies involved in the project). Through a detailed review of the literature, a theoretical framework was identified that allowed for a reading and interpretation of the data that emerged and the development of managerial implications. Starting from the analysis of what emerged from the focus groups and the comparison with the models provided by the companies, similarities and differences emerged between the companies’ competency-models, with the consequent criticalities to be managed. The literature analysis ultimately made it possible to develop a theoretical framework which. The latter opened up the analysis to a series of relevant ideas and for companies and those professionals involved in selection, talent management, training and performance management, as well as how these dimensions influence the value creation process within the organization and for the clients involved.
Timing: March 2016 – February 2017
Custom Research Projects for Companies
2021
- HENKEL
The ideal salesperson profile for Henkel: competence mapping - HILTI
At the roots of solution selling: drivers’ identification and validation - AKERON
Sales performance management: state of the art
2020
- ALLIANZ
A sale’s 7 steps: sales process, activities and competences for a consulting-approach to sales
2019
- ALLIANZ
Sales Academy: analysis and mapping of sales processes and online trainings - ABB
Manage digital transformation in sales: a model and its implementation - HILTI
Learning @ Hilti –Time to performance: the Lead Now Program about first line managers’ onboarding - ECOLAB
In search of commercial excellence
2018
- HILTI
Learning @ Hilti – Time to performance: the Goal Program about new recruits’ onboarding - BOEHRINGER INGELHEIM
Digital commercial transformation: an exploratory investigation of the sales network’s impact and perception
2017
- HILTI
Sales managers: their evolving competences
Account manager: which competences explain sales performance? Validation of Hilti’s competence system and test of these competences’ impact on MBO
Simplifying performance evaluation: measuring performance quality (KPIs and indicators)