SPIF! for Sales and Marketing Managers

Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster

Fix bottlenecks in your sales process,
Do things your salespeople will respect,
and keep the company president out of your office

If you’ve found this page, you have already been thinking about the challenges involved in improving your company’s sales process. You know there is more here than meets the eye:

• gathering information about the customer’s journey
• figuring out what your organization should be doing more of, and what it should be doing less of
• gaining the cooperation of everyone, from the field to the executive suite

In short, how are you going to make these ideas work?

Believe me, I know what you are facing.

You need simple, quick things you can do to earn the confidence of the people around you. Yet, the problems you face seem so intractable. There just isn’t much in the market that helps sales managers, or marketing managers, or their support staffs, like sales training departments, CRM systems managers, or sales operations managers, to figure out the puzzle.

• How to get salespeople to cooperate, gather data, and do their jobs right?
• How to help marketing departments (who might be understaffed and not have the right talent on board) to pay attention to the things the sales department really needs?
• How can you get the organization to start doing process improvement, and make quota at the same time?
• Where can you get the help you need to identify the real problems causing undesirable sales results?
• How can you get others in your organization to step back and think differently about what they are doing?
• How can you learn what you need to learn to put a positive spin on the momentum your team already has, without stopping the train to redesign everything from scratch?
• How can you make the most of resources you already have or might acquire in the future, like sales training and CRM software?

The last thing a fish discovers is water, they say. That is part of the reason Improving your sales process is so hard. The market doesn’t recognize it yet.

There are dozens of sales training companies who’ll sell you their great stuff. Tons of CRM companies whose systems will support any sales process no problem. Loads of marketing companies itching to do a lead generation campaign for you.

And no one but YOU who is accountable for the whole find-win-keep system and how well it works. If it works at all.

The Sales Performance Improvement Forum

That’s Why We Created SPIF!

Improving sales processes is one of the most challenging — and rewarding — kinds of work in the business world. My team at Sales Performance Consultants, Inc., has been pursuing this discipline one way or another for nearly 20 years, struggling to find information, examples, and solutions to challenging business problems.

We believe education on the scientific principles of managing and improving sales and marketing ought to be as readily available as it is in other professional societies, such as the American Society for Quality (ASQ) or the American Society for Operations Management (APICS).

I’m ready now, Michael (more after the jump):

What is SPIF! ?

SPIF! is a professional educational community devoted to evidence-based approaches to improving B2B revenue results. It is our way of sharing our discoveries and methods with other business professionals, and of learning from their experiences and discoveries as well.

When “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way” was published in 2006, it cemented my status as uber-geek of sales and marketing. Within six months, we were engaged in a consulting engagement much larger than anything we had ever done before.

A string of additional large engagements followed, giving my team and me a unique perspective on how process thinking affects corporate environments, and the reactions of key individuals, such as the senior executive, the sales VP, and the first-line sales managers.

Along the way, we’ve discovered some surprising things: expensive lessons, hidden opportunities, mine fields to avoid.

Now, my team and I are in a position to do that for you.

What You Get When You Become a Professional Member of SPIF!

Professional membership in the executive division of SPIF! gives you access to protected areas of our website containing:

• Foundational instruction (currently six hours and growing) on topics like:
  How to design/map a sales process
  How to develop effective sales qualification criteria
  How to map customer value and design more effective selling tools
  How to conduct a sales kaizen event
  How to ensure your customers can find your business through your website and search engines
• Webinar archives that broaden your knowledge of sales and marketing best practices and your business process acumen
  For example:
  How to help salespeople gain access to big new accounts
  - with Jill Konrath, author of “Selling to Big Companies”
  How to design and implement a lead generation campaign
  - with Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, and author of “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale”
  How to incorporate effective negotiation into your sales process
  - with Brian Dietmeyer, Managing Director of Think, Inc., and author of a”B2B Streetfighting”
  How to design and implement a nurturing campaign that gets prospects to buy
  - with Jim Cecil, founder of the Nurture Marketing Institute
• Access to upcoming webinars and courses about improving sales and marketing results by leveraging process ideas and rigor to get results faster, avoid mistakes, and get organizations to change faster. See upcoming events for more information.
• SPIF! Print newsletter, containing new, thought-leading articles and how-to-do-it information on improving your sales process. See the cover of a recent issue.
• Special pricing on important guidebooks and information products that will help you succeed
• Archives of presentations, templates, examples, newsletters, swap-files, and other valuable materials

You’ll be able to listen to unique, one-of-a-kind conversations about dealing with prospects and customers, salespeople, company presidents, and other consultants. You’ll be able to ask your questions about everything from sales and marketing techniques to statistical principles, and get answers from savvy, experienced practitioners. For example, have you ever struggled with consulting challenges such as:

• How to get sales managers to be interested in process ideas
• How to get senior executives to realize the value of a process approach
• How to position the value of your consulting engagement
• How to price your consulting services
• How to transition from training (or CRM, or other consulting) to management consulting
• When to stay away from process, yet still make progress with the client

These are tough, challenging questions, and my team, and other consulting members of SPIF!. are uniquely suited to help you grapple with them.

What other executive members have said:

Thanks for the seminar yesterday; it was yet another reminder that it is indeed possible to apply meaningful metrics to the marketing process.

May, Sigma Aldrich, Norway

I thought it was excellent! The content level was right on – particularly the level that the sales process topic was “framed” on the different views and perspectives that were shown. Excellent commentary from both Mike and Bob.

Jeff Barovich, VP Sales, Oco, MA

Great information!! Enjoyed the presentation.                   David Wimberly, Blackthorne Group, FL

Thanks for the consultative conversation and email threads.  As a result I think some things have changed for the better. Your input helped me format and present some ideas to my VP of North American sales this week.   And we must have hit some resonance points because we are now starting an informal project wrapped around many of the value points and strategies I gleamed from our conversation and the SPIF Webinars.  You did a great job in helping me structure my presentation and add some weight to my ideas.

Dan (Company Name Withheld), TN

Becoming a Member of SPIF! is easy. You can chose your level of interest.