Five Things Sales and Marketing Can Learn From Lean Production

Some companies already know a lot about the transition from traditional to lean production operations. As it turns out, there are remarkable parallels between the lean journey in manufacturing and the lean journey in sales and marketing (sales kaizen). When implemented effectively, both the benefits and the Read more

How to Make Salespeople 25% More Productive in 90 Days or Less

You probably have salespeople working overtime right now on deals that will be:

• bad business if you win them (too much trouble, not worth the revenue)
• lost to a competitor
• lost to no decision

If you’ve been around professional sales organizations for a long time, you already know that poor salespeople ignore qualification criteria; good salespeople, and their managers, obsess about it.

You’ve heard the acronyms. BANT, for example: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe. There are others. You may have worked with your team to define yours precisely.

Still, close ratios are erratic and deals are unpredictable. Sales people, trying to make quota, have little choice but to spend enormous amounts of time and money pursuing them. They can’t help it if many of the wrong prospects are in their sales funnel.

Right? 

Not right.

Most companies use an approach to qualification criteria that fails in at least three crucial areas. It is:

• Myopic: qualification criteria are driven narrowly by what they need
• Remedial: qualification is used only to correct poor performers
• Static: qualification criteria doesn’t change; yet market forces are continually changing

There is a far more productive approach to qualification than any you have probably heard of. Companies who fail to update this critical part of their sales process will continue wasting enormous amounts of time and money – which they probably cannot afford in this economy.

On Thursday, February 26, we will present a new and more effective approach to solving this problem:

In this webinar, you’ll learn an approach that has achieved some astonishing results:
•    90%+ forecast accuracy where ever it has been used
•    Works at the beginning of the sales cycle, not just at the end
•    Actually helps salespeople sell by influencing their decision making strategy

Rather than being myopic, remedial, and static, this simple new approach increases your company’s vision into customers, enables all of your salespeople to be more strategic, and changes with market forces.

It will lean out your sales funnel and improve the quality of your team's sales opportunities. And that will certainly increase your revenue, profitability, and success.

This will be the Read more

Grow Your Business and Lose the Fat by Putting Marketing and Selling on a “Lean” Diet

Michael J. Webb Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. January 2005 (pdf of this article) The idea behind “Lean Manufacturing” comes down to doing more for less while coming closer to giving customers what they Read more

What Value Does Your Process Create for the Customer?

As a sales manager 18 years ago, when I first asked myself this question, I distinctly remember the feeling of the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. I didn’t know the answer then. However, I do now, and you need to know it too. Read more

How Lean Is Your Sales Process?

“Lean Thinking” (by James Womack and Daniel Jones, Free Press, June 2003) helped galvanize a radical approach to managing manufacturing organizations that smooths out production flow, making it far more productive and responsive. Inevitably, some people wonder if “Lean thinking” could apply to sales and marketing—whether it could smooth out Read more

Can You Lean The Sales Process?

If you have not been focused on manufacturing industries in the last several years, you might wonder what the title of this article means. If you have been paying attention to those industries, however, you know that “Lean Thinking” (the title of a book by James Womack and Daniel Jones) Read more