Faculty and students at the SLC use rigorous research to help clients find solutions to their business challenges.
To learn more about the center’s research or to participate, please contact:
Yashar Atefi, PhD
Co-Director, Sales Leadership Center
yashar.atefi@du.edu
The research mission of the SLC is to conduct cutting-edge scientific analysis of the sales profession and provide insights to managers on state-of-the-art methods to build and maintain a competitive edge within their sales organization. We work closely with managers and executives on projects aimed at providing both practical implications for our clients regarding particular issues they face as well as scientific findings for academic audiences.
The topics of our research projects are driven by the specific challenges faced by our clients. Possible topics include:
- Evaluating changes in the sales organization (organizational changes, structural changes, role changes, compensation plan changes, etc.) and their business implications
- A/B testing specific strategies by creating or evaluating treatment and control groups within the sales force or the customer base
- Sales force compensation plans
- Resource allocation among salespeople
- Increasing the lifetime value of salespeople
- Sales strategy (i.e., macro‐level research examining effects across sales organizations)
- Sales force design (i.e., structure, alignment, sizing, territory design)
- Customer growth
- Customer engagement (i.e., buyer seller relationships, targeting, sales process)
- Negotiation strategies
- People and skills (i.e., leadership, performance management, evaluation of traits, and competencies of salespeople)
- Motivation (i.e., culture, incentives, metrics, goals)
- Sales operations (i.e., CRM, analytics)
- Training evaluation