Book Review – Introduction to Sales Process Improvement: Gaining More of the Right Customers at Higher Margins and Lower Costs with Lean and Six Sigma

Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc., $84, 182 pages, June 20, 2005, www.salesperformance.com. Many companies would like to be more scientific about sales and marketing, but fear causing more problems than results. Now, a unique and path-breaking work by Michael Webb enables those companies to apply Read more

How to establish a clear cause and effect relationship between promotional expenditure and sales

By Justin Roff-Marsh Over lunch, a CEO recently admitted to me that his financial controller was using his organisation’s profits to build quite a substantial commercial property portfolio. When I asked if this was best use of his organisation’s free cashflow, he smiled, “How Read more

How to build an objective management structure for your sales process

By Justin Roff-Marsh Imagine you were to awaken one morning suffering from a strange disorder: one that rendered your eyesight unreliable. When you open your eyes, your bedroom appears roughly as it did the night before. Your bed is below the Read more

What Value Does Your Sales Process Create?

By Michael J. Webb (pdf of this article) Most sales executives are challenged to produce better results these days. Jill Stillman, a sales executive I worked with a few months ago, seemed particularly frustrated. “There are Read more

Can Your Marketing and Selling Process Be Improved?

Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. Originally published in Marketing Times Spring 2005 (pdf of this article) Process improvement has revolutionized manufacturing over the past two decades, but is only now coming Read more

Book Review – “The Leaky Funnel Earn More Customers by Aligning Sales and Marketing to the way Businesses Buy”

by Hugh Macfarlane 2003, Bookman Media Pty Ltd (available on www.amazon.com) Submitted by Michael J Webb: HardBits (a mid-sized company in a maturing industry) is struggling because its products are being commoditized by competitors from around the world. Read more

What is Six Sigma… and Why Should Marketing and Sales Managers Care?

Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. Origionally published in Marketing Times Summer 2005 Subsequently published in Marketing Watchdog Journal, August 2005 (pdf of this article) Six Sigma is a funny name for a serious way of boosting marketing and sales performance. It’s already transformed manufacturing in hundreds of companies, and it is now doing the same in marketing and sales in companies such as Bank of America, Dell, General Electric, HSBC, Service Master, Johnson & Johnson, Standard Register, Sun Microsystems, Xerox, and many more. To apply Six Sigma to marketing and sales in your company, you’ll probably need to think in new ways. With Six Sigma, you base decisions on measurement and analysis of activities and results, then improve the activities to improve the results. Believe it or not, that’s generally not how marketing and sales are now managed (with one exception, which I’ll discuss). This article explains the basics of applying Six Sigma to marketing and sales. As it turns out, Six Sigma practitioners have the same goal as marketers and sellers: to find more profitable ways of giving customers what they want. Creating Value We all know that good marketing and selling gets other people to take the actions we want them to take. The challenge is in figuring out Read more

Book Review – “Escaping the Black Hole”

Escaping the Black Hole: Minimizing the Damage from the Marketing-Sales Disconnect Robert Schmonsees, Thompson Publishing, 2005 How much of your marketing and selling budget is wasted? In “Escaping the Black Hole -Minimizing the Damage from the Marketing and Selling Disconnect” (Thompson Publishing, 2005), author Bob Schmonsees demonstrates that in many companies that waste is as much as 25% as a result of misaligned assets, processes, and activities. Schmonsees begins with an examination of the symptoms and costs of dysfunctional sales and marketing relationships, and traces them directly to the heart of the problem: misalignment of the key processes and assets that drive the day-to-day activities of marketing and sales professionals. He also provides the reader with two axioms that will help companies institutionalize the principles of solutions centric-selling and turn the way they go to market into a sustainable competitive advantage.

• Marketing and sales must institutionalize a greater understanding of the customer’s business problems and the implications of those problems on the constituencies and stakeholders they sell to.

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Three Strategies (and How to Use Them) to Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster

By Michael J. Webb (pdf of this article) Originally published on December 6, 2005 by

What makes the sales funnel flow faster? The key is coordinating Read more

What Is Lean Six Sigma, and Why Should Strategic Account Managers Care?

by Michael J. Webb The answer to the twofold question posed in the title of this article is simple. Lean Six Sigma is a management method now used in most major manufacturing companies and many large service organizations to improve their performance, and you Read more