I’m glad to see someone talking about sales productivity platforms. The challenge of conceptualizing a sales productivity system is one I deal with everyday. As the VP of Sales for a sales production platform software company (www.xfi.com) our greatest hurdle is lifting sales leaders vision to think holistically about increasing productivity across the their sales ecosystem.

Identifying and fixing isolated bottlenecks is so tempting for sales leaders. Seeking to make a positive impact on sales productivity these CSO will implement a central repository for sales material, or put in a system to facilitate the reference process, or implement a knowledge mash-up to help sales people research their prospects. These are just three of the hundreds of point solution categories available. The price is cheap ($50 per seat), short implementation (3 to 4 weeks) and seemingly intuitive results.

The problem as you point out is that each of these solutions, taken individually or collectively, don’t address “the problem behind the problem,” are expensive to implement and support and don’t integrate well with one another.

Instead sales leaders would do well to turn to the same type of platform concept used to automate factory floors decades ago. I don’t mean to suggest that sales, especially complex sales, is a routine repeatable process that can be easily automated. Instead I’m suggesting a platform that connects the people, process, programs technologies and content into a single, unified go-to-market production engine.

Such a system focuses on automating the mundane elements of the even the most sophisticated sales process, provide sales with customized and personalized sales material to facilitate sales conversations and providing a closed loop quality and quantity feedback system on lead and production flow for all participants in the sales ecosystem.

Process thinkers had a hard time selling senior management on process ideas in manufacturing at the beginning too. Now, among most manufacturers it is difficult to argue against the benefit of a process approach (though it is still not implemented well in many places).

I think one reason this is true is there are more angles now that share some common foundations. Deming had his techniques and stories. Goldratt had Theory of Constraints and his success stories. Six sigma has its successes. Womack did a great job with the lean thinking concept. Then of course there is kaizen.

Each of these provides a different way of communicating value to senior management. If they don’t understand statistical variation, maybe they’ll respond to reducing waste. Maybe they’ll understand the concept of bottlenecks.

Selling anything requires communicating in the language the recipient understands. This is especially true for abstract words like “sales process” (You can learn about manufacturing processes in schools. You cannot learn much about sales processes there.)

Which concrete problems and pains are your senior managers having? Solve for those.

For example, which of these solvable selling challenges are most important?

• Generating enough highly qualified leads for salespeople?
• Enabling salespeople to prioritize the right prospects (rather than the wrong ones)?
• Achieving much higher sales forecast accuracy?

If you are dealing with a person who is uneducated about processes, you have to start on simple, small things and build from there.

Michael

I have recently read your book (Six Sigma way to ) which is available in India now. I am a regular reader to your blog and read all the comments by other experts in the field of sales adn marketing. In my experience the biggest bottleneck a manager faces in India to sell his idea on Sales Process to top management. In India the economy is on growth path hence personality of sales person yield good results. Hence the top management thinks that Process is a waste of time and effort as it does not give results overnight and any process initiative is vehemently opposed by the high performing sales people.

I would love to have some idea on the implementation of the sales and marketing process in high growth economies as China, India, Brazil etc.

regards

Niraj

It is true that personality traits affect salespeople’s productivity. I generally stay away from that topic because it hides the primary problem: Far more good can be created by designing and improving the system salespeople live in.

If your team has a few supermen and women who can succeed regardless of the obstacles the company leaves in their way, that’s great. However, having your business dependent on them is a poor strategy, IMHO.

Just imagine what those people could achieve – and how happy they would be – if the system they operated in was designed to maximize everyone’s productivity!

Michael

I’m a firm believer in sales process optimization and sales/marketing integration. However I also believe in the importance of the sales peoples DNA. It is my observation that sales reps with higher goal orientation and lesser barriers to sales than average tend to sell more and take greater responsibility in getting new leads or contacting new prospects. I think you can be inspired and add another dimension than process thinking to your very inspirational thought leadership by understanding also the value of the sales rep profiles. I normally apply tests as SPQ Gold Test or Sales Key to help visualize and measure the strengths of the sales force as supplement to the sales process and management practices.

Christian Milner

in my book velocity is a way to higher productivity

~Christian

I prefer to create sales “velocity”

You can read about this on my post :Entrepreneur Best Practices; #1 “More” Sales or “Create Sales Velocity” ? http://nosmokeandmirrors.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/entrepreneur-best-practices-1-more-sales-or-create-sales-velocity/

What do you feel is more important? Productivity or Velocity?

Mark Allen Roberts