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

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

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

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

Need to Improve Salespeople’s Behaviors? Don’t Bother with Sales Training or CRM Until You Face the Facts

Michael J. Webb (pdf of this article) Have you ever wondered, what is the best way to incorporate sales training methodologies in a CRM system? Sometimes the question comes when a company wants a better return from Read more

Three Proven Tactics to Get Salespeople’s Cooperation in Launching New Initiatives

by Michael J. Webb (pdf of this article) One of the most common questions from executives trying to improve sales and marketing results is this: “How can we get our salespeople’s cooperation in our new (blank) initiative?” Whether you Read more

Five Ways to Minimize Sales and Marketing Frustration, Waste, and Cost

by Michael J. Webb (pdf of this article) What steps of your sales and marketing process produce the most cost, waste, and frustration? Here are five important mistakes you can work on to make your sales and marketing more Read more

Seven Ways to Permanently Improve Sales

by Michael J. Webb (pdf of this article) Leading a company is a difficult job in the best of times. Yet executives can take common sense steps to make things easier to generate Read more

Will This Year’s Sales Process Create the Results You Need Next Year?

"The 'measurements' weren't telling anything about reality.
They were telling just the opposite …"

What do you measure in the day-to-day operation of your sales process?

Most companies have only rudimentary measurements (if they measure anything at all). They count initial contacts (e.g., phone dials or cold calls), appointments or demonstrations, proposals, and closes.

Unfortunately, this information is almost useless. It really is. One reason for this is that it is haphazardly acquired (salespeople, rightfully, hate to track this stuff).

For example, one VP I worked with was proud of the information in his CRM system. He had enforced a requirement that salespeople enter their opportunities into the CRM system in order to generate a quote / proposal.

The result? A great stream of data about quotations, and an impressive close ratio.

However, an analysis of those close ratios revealed the opposite of what everyone thought. We presented a team of managers and salespeople with a chart illustrating the close ratios of each salesperson, ranked from lowest to highest performance.

The person with the lowest close ratio, Chris, was one of the top producing salespeople in the company – had been for years

Of course, the salespeople were using the CRM only because they were forced to. They entered only the quotes they had to formalize with customers, the ones they were pretty sure they were going to win.

Chris, on the other hand, embraced the system and tried to use it as a tool to keep himself organized. He entered all of his opportunities, not just the "good ones." That's why his close ratio was lower than anyone else's.

The "measurements" weren't telling anything about reality. They were telling the opposite.

This doesn't mean measures are impossible in this environment. It means you have to challenge your assumptions  – you have to make sure you've actually connected to reality. 

What You Think You Know Ain't Necessarily So

Most executives are not used to thinking critically about the sales process. Their assumptions about how it works and what can be (and should be) measured have gone unchallenged for years. It makes them uncomfortable to start thinking they might not know what is going on.

Yet the world is changing faster now than at any time in history. Who would have guessed the dramatic impact the Internet is having? That customers would be seeking answers to their questions and problems via search engines many times every day? That old models of prospecting, qualifying, demonstrating, and closing don't work the same way in this environment?

The fact is the typical measurements of most company's "sales process" aren't measuring much of anything. Scratch the surface, and you'll find:

gaping differences in how various people interpret the terms such as lead, cold call, qualified prospect, proposals, etc.
performance and compensation expectations that conflict with what customers want
dramatic variations in how both sales and marketing people do their jobs

In this environment, even if there were a measurement system, it wouldn't be able to do its job.

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How a Marketing Kaizen Event Can Make
Your B2B Website Rock in 90 Days or Less
A Teleseminar for B2B Companies
http://www.saleskaizen.com/B2BMarketingDec04.aspx

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Your Gut is Not Smarter than Your Head, But if That is All You Have …

Sales and marketing managers have little choice in this environment. You can't blame them for it. You have to thank and respect them for surviving in such a savage situation.

Then you have to begin figuring out how to help them get out of this pit, because you cannot improve what you can't measure. That goes double for a sales process, especially a multi-step environment with multiple buying influences.

This situation is not going to change on its own. The organization will continue to go down the same tracks, buying sales training, marketing campaigns, tradeshows, and so forth. 

Ask yourself, "Will this year's sales process create the results you need next year?"

Improving your organization's sales and marketing results is completely outside your control until you establish a reasonable, measurable process, one in which the connection to reality is validated. Middle managers, like marketing and sales managers, desperately need the signals provided by a measurement system to tell them when value is being added and when it isn't. Right now, they are relying on gut feel, and this is what must be changed.

This is a scary thought for most sales and marketing executives, but it doesn't have to be.

The fact is, there is a great way to execute a limited, effective intervention that will improve results measurably for your sales and marketing process in 90 days or less.

It is a Kaizen Event for sales and marketing.

It is obvious that companies should be applying scientific principles like Lean, Six Sigma, and Kaizen to their marketing and selling, but until now, there hasn't appeared to be an effective approach. What companies need is a way to:

• Gain more business in the short term
• Assure a positive result, while limiting the risk
• Ensure a positive experience by their team, especially by field sales
• Enable ongoing, continuous improvement without assistance from the outside

Most importantly, they need to be sure that the process changes in a meaningful, positive way – right away!

In short, the situation with most sales and marketing organizations is tailor made for Kaizen Events. Last month (on November 5), I conducted the first in a series of teleconferences around Kaizen Events in sales and marketing. In that teleconference, I illustrated how the principles of process improvement (TQM, Lean, Six Sigma, and Kaizen) could be applied to sales and marketing. I provided a model for the right way of conducting value stream mapping in sales and marketing. The response was tremendous – more than 300 people have now registered or viewed that teleconference, many asking for more information.

This week, on Thursday, I'll be demonstrating an even more timely application of Kaizen: I'll be interviewing John Fox, expert in B2B marketing and the author of "The Marketing Playbook." We'll present a simple, high-voltage way to juice up your company's lead generation efforts. This subject is of focal interest to our audience, but is only one avenue for sales process improvement using the Kaizen approach.

Most importantly, you'll learn how this can be easily measured so that your company has the foundation for continuous process improvement.

I promise you – it is so easy to implement what you are going to learn in this teleconference.

The economic crisis is not abating. Your company needs to be doing this now to get into the best position for next year.

Visit http://www.saleskaizen.com/B2BMarketingDec04.aspx and sign up now.

Michael Webb

Dec 2, 2008