There's a question all top managers should ask: "How can I make my sales force, which is one of the biggest and most important investments my company makes, perform more effectively?"

There are several reasons that question is so important.

For sales managers, this is not an easy question to answer. The number of salespeople affects profitability by impacting both revenues and costs. It's easy to estimate costs by looking at historical compensation, benefits, field support, and travel costs per salesperson. But it's much more difficult to predict revenues, as it requires understanding how complexities such as customer needs, the economy, and the effectiveness of your and your competitor's salespeople, influence a sales force's ability to generate sales.

To build a great company, it's important to have strong executives leading the sales organization. But just as in the military, talented top officers can't make up for weakness in the ranks of frontline leaders, the mid-level managers who are vital in driving day-to-day sales performance. "In any sales force, you can get along without the vice president of sales, the regional sales directors, and the training manager," a sales leader once told us. "But you cannot get along without first-line sales managers."

Salespeople generally have a great deal of autonomy in deciding which customers and products to focus on, how hard to work, and who to collaborate with. At the same time, sales leaders and managers try to affect the choices salespeople make using two predominant forms of influence—"push" and "pull".

In the continuous hunt for profitable growth, silver bullets won't fix your sales force. The solutions to most sales force challenges are multi-dimensional. Especially when things are not going well (and sometimes even when they are), sales leaders need to know when evolutionary sales force improvements are enough to drive profitable growth, and when it's necessary to implement a wholesale sales force transformation.

When it comes to enhancing sales force productivity and performance, it's tempting to look for silver bullets. Is customer retention declining? Okay, let's roll out a new sales training program that teaches salespeople how to be more customer-focused. Is sales growth lagging? Let's implement a more aggressive incentive plan to motivate the sales force. Is sales productivity decreasing? Let's build a Big Data solution that enables salespeople to glean insights so they can sell smarter.

We recently blogged about the importance of knowing what characteristics (innate traits and abilities) and competencies (learned skills and knowledge) salespeople need to be successful. But how do you identify which attributes (characteristics and competencies) belong in your sales success profile?

Perhaps the best source, and one that is too frequently overlooked, comes from within your own sales force — your best salespeople. 

When it comes to hiring sales talent, many companies prefer to "buy" instead of "build." A sales leader at a technology company recently told us: "We only hire experienced salespeople who can hit the ground running." Leaders of these companies argue that hiring experience reduces training costs while allowing the company to gain outside perspective. In addition, salespeople with experience in the same industry bring customers and get quick sales.

But experience alone is not a sufficient predictor of who will be successful in a sales role.

You've heard the pitch: "You now have a huge volume, variety, and velocity of customer data, sales transaction data, competitive data, and sales activity data. With the combination of cloud storage and computing, mobile technologies, and powerful analytical and predictive tools, we can start mining 'big data' and reaping huge rewards."

It's not that simple, especially for sales forces.

If you had to decide between having a team of excellent salespeople with an average manager, or having a team of average salespeople with an excellent manager, which would you choose?