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Unconventional B2B Marketing Creates Success for Small Company

by Michael J. Webb Most businesses have difficulty finding, winning, and keeping enough customers at one time or another. This can be especially true for companies in technical industries. Synergetic Microsystems had this problem, and this article explains how they solved it. First, some Read more

Implementing a Formal Selling Process and Performance Measures in a Sales Organization

Implementing a Formal Selling Process and Performance Measures in a Sales Organization[1]

Joe Vavricka and Barry Trailer

Trailer Vavricka, Inc.

Summary: This paper describes implementing a process management framework and performance measurements into a corporate sales organization. It begins with describing the traditional approach to sales management and the potential impact of improving sales performance on revenue and profits. Then, the company s process-based approach to sales management is described along with the key performance measures most relevant for monitoring sales revenue production across sales, marketing, and customer support departments. This case illustrates that viewing sales as a production process and implementing process performance measures will enable a company to significantly increase sales and improve sales predictability by increasing productivity throughout the process.

THE TRADITIONAL SALES MANAGEMENT APPROACH

Role of the salesforce

The purpose of the majority of corporate salesforces is twofold:

1. Keep sales revenue coming into the company at a rate that meets or exceeds budgeted revenue and growth targets.
2. Create customer expectations and relationships which will produce high satisfaction, desire to buy more in the future, and customers who are willing to act as references to influence prospects, generate referrals, and provide feedback that will help improve products and services.

The traditional sales approach

Sales departments traditionally operate informally, that is, without having a formal selling process followed by Read more

Generating Support For A Sales Quality Initiative

Originally published at www.isixsigma.com on Nov 25th 2002

By Michael J. Webb Quality initiative in sales – an impossible dream? With the right proposition and simple techniques, not only is it possible but it can also be a successful venture. Read more

Can Six Sigma Work in a Sales and Marketing Environment?

by Paul Selden Originally published in the ASQ Six Sigma Forum, 2001 William Latzko, a professor at the Fordham University Graduate School of Business and a colleague of W.E. Deming, remarked to me not long ago that the great opportunity for quality in the twenty-first century lies in sales process improvement. Indeed, quality thinking offers a perspective that can help launch sales, marketing, and customer service into a new frontier of systematic, long-term improvement. Likewise, Six Sigma has come to represent something of a new frontier for many companies wanting to achieve bottom-line benefits through quality improvement. Its success in capturing attention stems from highly visible proponents like GE s Jack Welch, along with its focus on achieving tangible financial results and application to a broad range of situations. Combining these two realities the opportunity to improve sales and the momentum of Six Sigma would seem to guarantee a wealth of possibilities for successful improvement projects tied to increasing revenue. Through the lens of Six Sigma, the same types of improvement opportunities found in manufacturing can be found in arenas involving more direct person-to-person and customer interchange. Marketing program yields can be improved, sales cycle times can be reduced, and service can produce fewer defects (for example, customer defections). The table below lists a veritable smorgasbord of tangible opportunities for improvement in the world of sales, marketing, and customer service framed in terms that are more engineering-like. Selected Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service Improvement Opportunities Mistake-proofing customer needs analysis Improving ROI on existing customer feedback Increasing convenience to the customer Systematic improvement of conversion ratios Pricing policy and system simplification Order entry/processing error reduction Reduce gaps between commitments and execution Shorten concept-to-customer cycle time The range of genuine opportunity makes Six Sigma sound promising for sales and marketing. In spite of the promise, those experienced with the standard approach to Six Sigma often conclude that delivering it as is to an audience of sales and marketing personnel is far too risky. Why?

What Makes Six Sigma for Sales So Difficult?

Four of the most common causes for failure when a Six Sigma program is presented to sales and marketing can be attributed to its inherent production-centric bias. Having remedied some of Six Sigma s own defects when Read more

How to Avoid the Four Most Common Mistakes of Sales Process Mapping

Originally published at www.isixsigma.com on Feb 17th 2003 By Michael J. Webb Process mapping is a well-known technique for creating a common vision and shared language for improving business results. It helped one management training and development firm realize that people Read more

What’s Wrong With Six Sigma?

By Michael J. Webb Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. February 2005 At a conference not long ago a speaker (who happened to be a friend) raised objections to applying Six Sigma in sales and marketing. The objections were oddly tangled, with some based on legitimate concerns Read more

Implementing Six Sigma in a Global Sales Organization

Originally published in Velocity Magazine (the Strategic Account Management Association), Q1 2003 http://www.strategicaccounts.org/ by Paul Hesselschwerdt, President, and Charles W. Kellogg, II, Principal, Global Partners, Inc. By now, most people have heard of Six Sigma, the business improvement method Read more

Why Your Sales Process Cost Matters, and What You Need to Know to Get it Right

By Michael J. Webb (pdf of this article) One of the most important management systems for the senior executive is the one that measures the costs of production. Executives must know not just the Read more

What Is Operational Excellence in Sales and Marketing?

by Michael J. Webb (with Robert Ferguson) (pdf of this article) A reader from Microsoft recently asked me an interesting question: “What are the key parameters which define Operational Excellence in a sales and marketing organization?” I like the question, because Read more