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Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 1
Find, Win, and Keep More Customers
Using Sales Process Improvement A Guide for Sales and Marketing Managers
by
Michael J. Webb, President Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.
Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.
Roswell, GA 30076
(877) 784-6507
www.salesperformance.com
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 2
Table of Contents
Introduction: Using Sales to Create Value for Customers
Chapter 1. Beyond the Numbers Game
Chapter 2. Viewing Sales as a Process
Chapter 3. Measuring the Value Created by Your Sales Process
Chapter 4. The Role of Marketing in the Sales Process
Chapter 5. Three Root Causes of Sales Problems
Chapter 6. Case Example: Business to Business Software Company
Chapter 7. Sales Process Improvement Engages Other Functions
Chapter 8. Leading Salespeople to Process Approaches
Chapter 9. Maximizing the Likelihood of Success
About Michael J. Webb
About Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 3
Introduction:
Using Sales to Create
Value for Customers
If you are a sales or marketing manager, you may be skeptical about applying quality and
process improvement to your area. That is understandable. The approach differs sharply
from what I call the usual fixes for sales problems, such as sales training, software
programs, incentive schemes, lead generation and promotional campaigns, and so on.
As a former sales manager and sales trainer, I understand sales, customer buying
processes, and organizational impediments to increased sales performance. I know that
marketing campaigns lack coordination, lead generation often fails, administrative tasks
waste time, bottlenecks frustrate salespeople, and monthly revenue demands keep sales
managers and salespeople under constant stress. I also understand how process
improvement can position you to solve most of the problems you face.
In this document, I won’t go into the history or achievements of quality improvement in
manufacturing. Nor will I drill you on the technical aspects of those methods (which I
covered in some depth in my book Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way). Instead, in
this guide I will:
Explain how current sales management methods create problems in sales, and
why current problem-solving methods don’t work
Describe how process excellence applies in sales and marketing and why it is
worth applying
Show how you can begin to work within your organization to start applying
process excellence to your sales and marketing functions, particularly if your
company has in-house process improvement expertise and experience
The alternative is to continue to manage sales and marketing as they are currently
managed in most business-to-business (B2B) sales environments, even in many otherwise
sophisticated, customer-focused organizations. As a sales or marketing manager, you owe
it to yourself, to your salespeople, to your organization, and to your customers to
seriously consider this approach to managing sales and marketing.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 4
Chapter 1
Beyond the Numbers Game
Despite developments such as “consultative selling” and “partnering with customers,”
salespeople in B2B environments still mainly work to set up sales calls, present products,
and move each potential deal from lead to prospect to customer. They build
relationships, cultivate internal champions, negotiate prices, and create a sense of
urgency, while management monitors the numbers of leads, prospects, and customers
these activities produce. As a result, salespeople and sales managers alike view sales as a
numbers game.
In this game, sales managers push their salespeople to find more leads, convert more
leads into prospects, and persuade more prospects to become customers, and salespeople
work to meet these expectations. The primary goals are to hit your targets, achieve your
quotas, make your numbers.
Sales is about numbers, but sales should not be managed as a numbers game.
Leads, prospects, calls, and customers
Forecasts, quotas, budgets, and variances
Market share and penetration are important
You cannot manage sales as a numbers game focused solely on the questions:
How many leads do we have?
How many prospects?
Where are they in the pipeline?
How many calls did we make?
How many deals will close in this period?
Call Out
Do you manage sales as a numbers game? How is this working for you?
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While these questions have their place, they have crowded out more useful questions
such as:
What value are customers now seeking from our products?
What do prospects want and need when making a purchase decision?
Which sales and marketing activities are working? Which ones aren’t?
What are the main organizational impediments to sales?
How can we make selling easier for salespeople?
Here are five reasons to stop managing sales solely as a numbers game:
1. You’re measuring only results: Measuring the number of leads, prospects,
calls, and closed deals is fine, but they are gross measures. The numbers game
prompts the questions How-many? and Did-you-close? which tends to drive
increased activity with little thought to the value created by the activity.
2. You’re not measuring quality: The numbers game ignores the quality of leads,
prospects, and customers. (If you’re a sales manager you have at some time
surely received a huge folder of useless leads from a marketing campaign.) Not
even all customers are created equal. Don’t you want the best leads, prospects,
and customers?
3. You’re not measuring value: Your sales process can and should create value for
your prospects and customers, as well as for your company. It should do so at
every stage of the Customer’s Journey, and this value should be measured. If all
you measure is sales results, that isn’t happening.
4. You can’t tell what is working and what isn’t: This is the biggest problem with
the numbers game. Until you realize a needed to systematically analyze what was
working and not working in the field, you can’t develop the methods for doing it.
As a result, you cannot improve the value your sales process creates because
you’re not detecting or measuring that value.
5. You can’t solve sales problems: Without data on what’s working and what isn’t,
you cannot discover the cause of sales problems or improve productivity. You
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cannot even define sales problems accurately. This leaves you with only
experience and intuition—and the usual fixes—rather than data and problem-
solving tools.
If you manage sales as a numbers game as described here, you are doing what most
companies do. We all know this. We’ve all seen numbers-driven sales managers who
book revenue into the period that makes sales look best. We’ve all seen managers
discourage “stories” from salespeople trying to explain where the customer is in the
pipeline or why they didn’t buy. We’ve seen managers insistently repeat, “Did you
close?” to focus the salesperson on getting the deal (and perhaps to humiliate him or her).
This may be the way you were taught sales and sales management. It may even be the
way you manage sales. You might even be able to make your numbers most of the time.
But there’s a better way.
Questions to Consider
To what extent do you manage sales as a numbers game? Is this working for you?
What data do we now use to measure the value of sales activities?
How do you know which sales activities are—and aren’t—creating value?
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 7
Chapter 2
Viewing Sales
As a Process
“Sales process” means different things to different people. To most sales managers and
salespeople, the sales process comprises “the things salespeople do” to move customers
through the sales funnel. Many sales managers think of the sales process as the sales
funnel or pipeline, as in the question, “Where is ABC Company in the sales process?”
From the organizational standpoint, sales is a process for producing customers. More
specifically, it is a process for finding, winning, and keeping customers. In general and
although there’s overlap:
marketing finds customers
sales wins customers
service keeps customers
Exhibit 1 illustrates this “production process,” which takes inputs (people who may need
your product) and adds value to transform them into outputs (customers).
Exhibit 1
Sales Is a Process for Producing Customers
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 8
Let’s enrich our definition a bit, to make it more precise and useful:
The sales process is the set of linked, measurable activities which
the organization uses to find, win, and keep customers.
This definition is useful because it enables us to:
Consider the work involved in each sales activity, and connections among
activities
Identify the role of each activity in finding, winning, and keeping customers, and
the inputs and outputs related to each activity
Develop ways to measure each activity’s cost and the value it creates for
customers
You may be put off by defining sales as a production process, but please stick with me.
Yes, “producing customers” and “adding value to inputs” may sound operational or even
mechanistic. After all, we are talking about people—your customers. Yet this view will
enable you to create value for those people like no other approach to sales.
Call Out
The sales process includes everything your company does to find, win, and keep
customers (not just what salespeople do).
Here’s an example of what I mean. You’re no doubt familiar with the Customer’s
Journey, the path that your customers travel in moving from lack of awareness of your
product and the problem it solves to becoming customers. As you know, customers don’t
care about your problems (such as making your numbers); they care about their problems,
including the kind that your products can solve for their company.
At the start of their journey they might be unaware that they have a problem, unaware
that solving it should be a priority, and unaware of your company’s solution. They need
your marketing and sales process to make them aware. At each stage of their journey,
prospects need your company’s help, and sales and marketing should provide it.
However, an organization’s sales process is not necessarily set up to do that. (In fact, it is
set up more to perpetuate the numbers game.) As a result, the motives of buyers on the
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 9
Customer’s Journey and the activities of sellers can actually repel one another (as shown
in Exhibit 2).
Exhibit 2
The Customer’s Journey vs. the Sales Process
Prospects want help on the journey they make from being people who are unaware of or
uninformed about the problem your company solves (“suspects”) to being people who
have solved that problem with your product or service (“customers”). To the extent that
your sales and marketing activities provide that help, they create value for the customer.
To the extent that they do not, they create waste. This is great news, because once you
commit to creating value with your sales process, the whole game changes. It changes
from the numbers game to the value game.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 10
Questions to Consider
How do I currently think of our sales process?
What are the stages in our Customers’ Journey?
What is our sales process—our set of linked, measurable activities for finding,
winning, and keeping customers?
How do our sales activities match up with our Customers’ Journey?
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 11
Chapter 3
Measuring the Value
Created by Your Sales Process
Sales and marketing activities become truly customer focused when you commit to
delivering value through them. To do this, you start by assessing those activities based
on the value they create for prospects. You also assess the value they create for your
organization. You then need to link sales and marketing activities so that they lead
prospects step-by-step through the Customer’s Journey.
This makes selling easier. At some points, persuasion, which is what most people think
of as selling, will be called for and that’s partly why you have salespeople. However,
persuading people who are ready to take the next step is much easier than persuading
people who are not. And more of the former is an improvement over more of the latter.
The key to making sales easier is figuring out how your customers can receive more
value from your process and realize that they have received it. Consider two questions:
How do you know when the offers on your website, product information, sales
calls, customer needs analyses, and other activities are creating value, and if these
need to be improved?
How do you know when salespeople are calling on accounts for months at a time
whether they are truly creating value for your company?
Answer: You measure the value that prospects give you in response to those activities.
Those activities aim to influence prospects’ behavior. Therefore, value is created when
the prospect take an action.
Call Out:
Value is created when a prospect takes an action you want them to take.
You may recognize this as the direct-response model of selling: when the prospect mails
the bounce-back card or calls the toll-free number, the activity worked. What I’m
discussing resembles that, but given the Internet and today’s methods of tracking and
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analyzing data, you can measure the value that your activities are creating at far more
granular levels.
Why do that? Because you can see which specific activities do and don’t work. You can
use ongoing analysis to continually improve every part of your sales process. This is
managing sales based on data, not opinion, on codified experience, not on what we think
is happening.
This is how you can ensure your salespeople are doing what is necessary to make quota
every day, rather than being forced to make it up at the end of the quarter with deals and
promotions.
This is possible because prospects “pay” you for the value you create for them by giving
you five things that are precious to them (and to you). You can measure these five things
at the behavioral level, compile data based on those metrics and know whether or not
specific activities are creating value for specific prospects. These five things are:
Attention: In today’s market, you need surefire ways of getting prospects’
attention. Is your Website getting the right kind of visitors? Is your lead
generation drawing the attention of the right prospects? Do prospects draw other
people’s attention to your site? You can measure these things.
Time: Prospects’ time is even more precious. Do they spend time on your site?
Which pages interest them most? Do they spend time with your salespeople, on
the phone or in person? Do they put your proposals on their meeting agendas?
Do they make time for you?
Information: If your sales process gives valuable information, you should get
valuable information in return—not only contact data but honest information
about the prospect’s problem, your product’s fit, and their strategies, budgets,
motivations, and objections.
Cooperation: We’ve all experienced sales situations where the fit between
product and problem, the chemistry between salesperson and prospect, and the
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timing, and even the planets line up beautifully. Then you have most sales
situations. Resistance is the norm. So if you are gaining cooperation, you are
delivering value. Cooperation is evidenced by prospects giving you their
attention, time, and information, and moving forward on their journey.
Commitment: This is what every salesperson wants. But if you measure
commitment only in purchase orders, you’re measuring only final results. You
want to measure commitment in terms of what prospects do for you in return for
things you do for them in the sales process. Commitment reflects salespeople’s
practice of “tying down” points with the prospect (“If we could deliver the
product as you specify by that date and at that price, do we have a deal?”). In
addition, tracking broken commitments and the underlying reasons can yield
valuable information about your product, pricing, service, and sales problems.
Here is great news: your organization is already getting these five valuable things from
prospects! What’s missing are ways of measuring and analyzing that value and ways of
conducting experiments that will help you find surefire ways of creating more of it.
Questions to Consider
How do we now measure the value that our sales process is creating for
prospects?
Do we develop and deploy sales and marketing activities designed to get
prospects’ to give us their attention, time, information, cooperation, and
commitment?
How could we improve the capabilities of our sales process, given that we want it
to create value that prospects will “pay for”?
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 14
Chapter 4
The Role of
Marketing in the Sales Process
I’ll state this as simply as possible: The role of marketing should be to make selling
easier. Everything marketing does—in product development, Web-based and other
communications, advertising, promotion, pricing, packaging, positioning, lead
generation, or any other activity—should make selling easier.
Call Out
The role of marketing is to make selling easier.
This is especially so given that most prospects now turn to the Internet for much of the
information they used to get from salespeople. Knowing this, most sales organizations
take Web-based marketing seriously, yet few B2B companies (in contrast to B2C
companies) use this interactive marketing medium to their full advantage.
Certain “show-the-flag” activities, such as trade show booths that fail to generate
business and product literature that no one reads, don’t make selling easier. They also
waste resources. At least some of what marketing does can actually make selling harder.
Poorly devised value propositions, hard-to-navigate Websites, and leads that sales cannot
use hamper sales efforts.
How can marketing “make selling easier” in this context?
Here are five ways:
1. Perform only value-adding activities: Marketing activities that create value
help prospects on their Customer’s Journey. Marketing can add major value in
the early stages when generating awareness, nurturing relationships, explaining
your value proposition, establishing your credibility, and deploying calls to action
are important.
2. Measure the value created: Measure the value that marketing activities create,
rather than only the volume of activities or questionable metrics like exposure,
reach, and recall. To measure value, you must measure prospects’ responses in
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click-throughs, requests for information, submission of contact data (say, in
exchange for a white paper or survey), telephone inquiries, and live or virtual
meetings. Measure the attention, time, information, cooperation, and commitment
prospects give you.
3. Locate leads and prospects: While the idea that marketing finds customers,
sales wins customers, and service keeps customers should not be rigidly adopted,
it should be adopted. That way, marketing has a productive role in the sales
process and a stake in its success. The goal of locating and nurturing high-quality
leads and prospects can erase the image (and, when it exists, the reality) of
marketing as an “ivory tower” function. It will also make selling easier.
4. Share goals with sales: Sales is far more accountable for results than marketing.
This is wrong, and it creates a gap between sales and marketing. If marketing is
responsible for locating leads and prospects, then it should be held accountable
for the number and quality of the leads and prospects and for how it produces
them and for the value of those leads and prospects.
5. Collaborate more closely with sales: Someone needs to be responsible for
nurturing leads to the point in the Customer’s Journey where they are likely to be
won through selling efforts. These “drip marketing” efforts can occur in a variety
of ways, often via email and the Internet. They are less personal and less labor-
intensive and thus less expensive than sales efforts. But the handoff to sales must
be smooth, which calls for levels of collaboration between marketing and sales
which are rare in most companies.
Sales and marketing often work at cross purposes. This problem cannot be solved by
redrawing the org chart or asking them (again) to collaborate. It can be solved when they
sit down to develop a joint understanding of the end-to-end sales process. It can be
solved when they develop operational definitions and conduct specific, linked activities
that create and measure value for prospects and customers. It can be solved when they
experiment with small improvements to these activities, see some success, and
institutionalize productive ways of working together.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 16
Questions to Consider
What is the role of marketing in our sales process now?
In what ways does marketing now make selling easier? In what ways does it
make selling harder?
What have we done to increase collaboration and coordination between marketing
and sales? With what results?
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 17
Chapter 5
Three Root Causes of
Sales Problems
Whether in manufacturing or in sales, at its heart, Lean is a problem-solving process. It
begins with clearly defining the problem to be solved—without trying to find the
solution—and by finding data and evidence around the problem. You may have heard
about “visualizing the flow” in Lean. This is done so problems can be seen. Things then
proceed to locating the root cause of the problem—still without trying to find the
solution—and to gaining agreement regarding the root cause. With the problem and its
likely cause clearly defined, you develop a solution that may remove the cause and
eliminate the problem. (I say “may” because process improvement uses small
experiments to test solutions and then implements the best, most cost-effective ones.)
This is not the way that most “sales problems’ are defined as evidenced by the prevalence
of the usual fixes to sales problems. As noted, the usual fixes include sales training,
CRM or SFA software, personnel changes, sales contests, redistributions of accounts or
territories, tweaks to the compensation plan, and similar standard responses. Those fixes
generally address symptoms (if that) and at best improve part of the process if in fact
there was a problem with that part of the process.
Call Out:
Process improvement aims to gather evidence that uncovers root causes of sales problems
in order to develop countermeasures that actually work.
In contrast, process improvement aims to identify the root cause of sales problems. At a
high level, here are the three most common root causes of problems in the sales process
that I have experienced:
Lack of consistent definitions of value and results: As noted, most
organizations have not clearly defined “a lead” or a “qualified lead” and many
have not even defined “a profitable customer.” In addition, the value created by
the marketing and sales process is not defined or measured—or even considered
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as value. In many organizations, measuring the “close ratio” is as close as sales
comes to measuring results (beyond weekly and monthly sales figures).
Lack of data that indicates what is and isn’t working: The previous root
cause—lack of definitions and process measures—leaves sales managers without
the data they need to discern which activities are creating value and which ones
aren’t. The adage, “Half of the money we spend on advertising is wasted, but we
don’t know which half,” applies to most sales activities. In practice, marketing
keeps crafting value propositions, product literature, and promotions—usually
with little or no input from sales—and sales keeps following up, making calls,
submitting proposals, and trying to close. Without data all they can do is “try
harder.”
Lack of mechanisms for improving the quantity and quality of deals:
Without a process comprised of activities that match the needs of prospects at
specific stages of the Customer’s Journey, and without data on the value created,
management cannot improve the process itself, nor the quantity and quality of
deals. To solve problems, management turns to the usual fixes. To increase sales,
management adds more resources or increases activity.
In manufacturing, improvement is achieved by eliminating waste. In marketing and sales,
improvement can be achieved by eliminating waste (brochures no one reads, sales
proposals no one buys, etc.) and by enabling customers to receive and perceive more
value (for example, through better value propositions, reduced purchasing risk, and
quicker response to their needs).
Organizations need processes for two reasons:
First, to create predictable results with trained employees performing work in a
consistent way (so outcomes can be understood) with affordable resources.
Second, to continually improve those results by systematically identifying
problems and needed improvements in the work or materials, and by responding
to evolving customer needs.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 19
Call Out
Process improvement works by understanding the relationship between activities and
results.
In other words, an organization needs a process to create a result and a process for
improving the process—a feedback loop of data on the work being performed, on the
results that the work is creating, and on customers’ evolving definition of value. This
approach contrasts sharply with endlessly searching for sales superstars, admonishing
salespeople to work harder, and launching end-of-sales-period promotions. Instead it is a
genuinely new approach that relies on critical thinking, hard data, and rigorous analysis.
The good news is that this approach pays off dramatically over time, as you will see in
the next section.
Questions to Consider
How do we now go about defining and solving sales problems?
What do I consider to be the root cause of our sales problems?
What process do we have for improving our sales process?
What data do we have about the characteristics of prospects who buy versus those
who don’t?
What data do we have about whether we are creating any value for our prospects
as we work with them?
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 20
Chapter 6
Case Example: Business to Business
Software Company
Background: Several years ago, I worked with a small B2B software company. They
had been riding the Internet wave, and decided to take a serious, “process oriented”
approach to growing their business. They hired a well-known sales training company to
help them define a sales process, instituted 20 percent annual growth targets for the new
account sales department, and began investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay-
per-click marketing to generate leads with the goal of achieving that 20 percent growth.
Presenting Need: Unfortunately, new account revenue did not increase. It became clear
their investment in lead generation was not paying off. The president complained
salespeople would not follow the process they were given when he was not watching over
them. The sales manager was a sharp and aggressive fellow. He had been with the firm
since the beginning, and was good closing deals. Yet (like the salespeople who worked
for him), he was challenged by the low quality of the sales opportunities.
Research: Unfortunately, the increased flow of leads stressed the team’s ability to
respond properly to all of them. Unable to determine which were most likely to close,
they tried to treat them equally, grinding away at the leads, generating call-backs to offer
demos, software trials, and price quotes. Salespeople became frustrated when prospects
ignored their calls. Sales forecasts proved unreliable. Activity quotas were introduced.
People worked harder. However, new account sales results did not increase.
Root Cause Analysis: At this point, my firm, SPC, was hired to diagnose the situation.
After appropriate interviews and data gathering, we identified the root-cause of the
problem: The sales process had been designed primarily around pushing product, and was
disconnected from customer value. Customers naturally resisted salespeople’s attempts to
push them to do things they were not ready to do.
As a result, salespeople began to resist their training and the demands of the process and
the activity metrics imposed on them. The process provided no means of learning what
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customers wanted, or of experimenting with alternative approaches. The numbers game
was producing a diminishing return, as it always does.
Countermeasure: We helped the salespeople and the marketing department to gather
additional Voice of Customer data. This provided insight to characteristics that enabled
prospects to be ready to buy, as well as what prevented them from being ready. The steps
of the sales process were redesigned around the Customer’s Journey. Instead of pushing
prospects to do things, salespeople could ask questions, and make enticing offers of
information, depending on the specific answers they received. The offers were designed
so prospects who responded to them were more likely to be qualified than those who did
not.
In addition, prospect qualification criteria were redefined in terms of observable
characteristics of the deals, rather than vague generalizations. For example, the
salesperson’s access to decision makers could be defined in observable ways, such as
“Don’t know who the decision maker is,” or “Never met the decision maker,” or “Met the
decision maker.” As a more detailed example, the observable characteristics of a
prospect’s decision making process was defined as:
Don’t know their decision making process
We only know part of their decision making process
The main contact is only one of the many people involved
A committee has been formed, and our contact has influence
Main contact is the decision maker/signing authority
Test Standard Work1: As the work progressed, the sales manager and a few of the
salespeople began to try out the new qualification criteria on active deals. The way it
worked, each observable characteristic was given a score from 1 to 5, with the higher
score corresponding to the likelihood of winning the business. This gave salespeople the
ability to prioritize opportunities (those with the highest scores were prioritized the
highest. It also generated insights about what made various prospects more or less likely
1 Standard Work – a set of shared knowledge and respectful agreements about the best way of performing a
task or accomplishing a specified objective.
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to close. A statistical analysis of the data salespeople collected via their qualification
criteria suggested improvements to the qualification criteria as well. Sales forecasts
became more reliable.
The new process focused on offering information prospects could actually use rather than
pushing them to buy when they weren’t ready. It also helped salespeople know which
prospects would be easiest to close, and what they needed to do to make the rest of their
prospects easier to close. Salespeople liked the process.
Deploy Standard Work: The flow of pay-per-click marketing leads returned to earlier
levels. The client asked us to redesign their sales training and software tools to support
the improved sales approach. The focus of sales meetings also changed. Marketers now
attended the sales meetings, and the focus shifted from sales activities alone to the quality
of the prospects and salespeople’s interactions with them (guided by the observable
qualification characteristics). For example, salespeople complained they had difficulty
enticing a prospect in an insurance company with a case study from a manufacturing
company. In addition, if the methods for elevating the quality of a given prospect
(provide case studies, expand relationships, initiate a business presentation, etc.) failed to
elevate the quality of the prospect to the required level, salespeople were expected to
“walk away” if the prospect was still not yet ready to buy (a difficult thing to do when
you are being measured only on activity).
Continually Improve: As the flow of business turned up, many observations were made
about how to continue to improve. For example, case studies from different industries
were developed and tested successfully with prospects in those industries. Statistical
analysis of qualification scores revealed that the observable criteria for the decision
making process was not as predictive as expected. After a lengthy discussion, the
question was changed as follows:
To what extent do we understand the decision making process?
They don't know their decision making process
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 23
They have one, but we don't know it
We have partial understanding, but they won’t share more
We have partial understanding, and they will share more
We fully understand their decision process
This improvement (among others made to the qualification criteria) were more predictive,
and even gave salespeople a “secret” early indication of potential success: would the
prospect fully share their decision making process with them? Sales management and
executive management became more interested in process improvements, because they
knew that money would follow.
Results: With no additional marketing expense, and no change in the quality or quantity
of sales opportunities, the new account close ratio doubled, and deal size and margin
increased. Revenue from new accounts doubled. After two rounds of improvement in
qualification criteria, forecast accuracy exceeded 90 percent. The client applied the new
selling methods to existing accounts, which increased per user revenues and profitability
after the initial installation (with virtually no additional sales cost).
Most importantly, managers became more alert to how they managed the sales process,
realizing how important it is to check salespeople’s methods and data to ensure learning
took place. They also realized the value of sales meetings that produced a constant stream
of data around the high-impact, common causes for salespeople’s successes and
challenges.
Approximate Return on Investment: Consulting fees amounted to approximately
$200,000 over eight months. Increased profitability exceeded consulting fees in less than
12 months. Two-year return on investment (ROI) exceeded 600 percent.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 24
Chapter 7
Sales Process Improvement Engages Other Functions
In many companies, salespeople find themselves in a position resembling that of a
competent waiter in a restaurant that doesn’t have its act together. The value proposition
is wrong, so customers arrive with the wrong expectations. Or the place won’t take
reservations or books too many tables, thus creating long waits. Or the hostess is surly.
Or the menu misrepresents dishes. Or the kitchen is too slow, too fast, or incompetent.
Meanwhile, the waiter is the face of the restaurant and is supposed to “take care of” the
customer and is dependent on the customer for his income.
I am saying that often “sales problems” do not originate in sales. They start with faulty
or fuzzy value propositions, poorly targeted lead-generation programs, problems with the
product’s reputation or customer service’s responses to problems, and so on. I’m not
saying that salespeople never cause problems, but rather that much of their job involves
dealing with problems they have no control over. It is management’s job to solve those
problems. Again, this is about making sales easier and it is the sales manager’s role to
gain the cooperation of relevant functions within the organization, such as product
development, manufacturing, installation, customer training, service, credit, and billing.
Call Out
Processes improve when root causes of problems are found and addressed, no matter
whether they are within or outside of the sales department.
To gain the cooperation of other functions, start with a clear understanding of your sales
process and your total end-to-end value chain, from product development through
manufacturing, delivery, billing, and service. Develop an understanding of the role of
every function and its impact on customers and the sales process. Then examine the
entire system as a whole.
Voice of the Customer (VOC)—by which I mean all sources of data and information on
the customer experience—can be a particularly powerful tool in this regard. So can
process improvement experts in your organization. If your company has used Lean or
other quality improvement methods, you probably have in-house process excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 25
specialists, as well as operating managers or business unit heads with experience in the
practical application of process improvement. Be aware, however, that process
improvement must be adapted to sales.
Here are suggestions for working with other functions to solve problems in the context of
process improvement:
Serve as a customer advocate: Rather than noting how hard life is for your sales
or service people, learn how hard it is for the customer. As the sales saying goes,
“If the salesperson says it, maybe it’s true. If the customer says it, it’s certainly
true.”
Use VOC and other data: Use VOC and other data to show that the problem
warrants concerted action. Cite the revenue impact in lost business, and the costs
in wasted time, energy, expertise, and money—for the organization and, when
possible, the customer. Estimate the positive impact of fixing the problem.
Discuss the process and undesirable results: When you discuss problems,
people aim to avoid blame. When you discuss process and “undesirable results,”
you shift the aim to understanding what’s happening. This is not merely a
communication technique: in an organization it usually is the process, not the
people, that causes problems. Most people are not out to undermine the
organization; rather, they are working in suboptimal processes.
Collaborate on finding and fixing root causes: This principle underlies all
process improvement methods. If you can locate the root cause of a problem and
eliminate that issue, condition, or action, you will eliminate the problem.
Learn a bit of the language and a few tools: I would not suggest trying to learn
the foreign language of process improvement. But terms like undesirable results
and tools like “Five Whys” have a purpose. They aim to clarify thinking, usually
by defining what people mean when they say “undesirable result” or “quality” or
“waste” and to gain respectful agreement around causes of problems and how to
solve them. The tools replace intuition, opinion, and Band-Aids with
experiments, learning, and solutions.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 26
As these suggestions indicate, there’s nothing mysterious about process improvement and
there’s no reason not to apply it to sales. Process improvement assumes that to fix a
problem you must look upstream and downstream. You must look to your customers and
focus on creating value for them. And you must understand the root cause of a problem
and eliminate it.
When management takes this approach, salespeople need no longer behave like waiters in
one-star restaurants, shucking and jiving the customer, explaining and excusing screw-
ups. Instead, they can perform like conductors in symphony orchestras, cuing and
guiding the various customer-facing parts of the organization to perform to the
customers’ highest expectations.
Questions to Consider
Overall, how would I rate my salespeople in terms of their effectiveness and
efficiency in performing their sales activities?
What are the most persistent impediments to sales that I and my salespeople see
as originating in product, pricing, or organizational problems outside of sales?
What have I or my predecessors tried to do in the past to solve these problems and
remove these impediments? With what results?
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 27
Chapter 8
Leading Salespeople
to Process Approaches
Salespeople are crucial to the success of sales process improvement, yet they are often
skeptical of such efforts. This is understandable. A process approach often repels
salespeople because it is a process approach; it stresses data, rationality, order, and rigor
to people drawn to the interpersonal, emotional, roving, unpredictable nature of selling.
Many salespeople are salespeople because they dislike regimentation, or even sitting at a
desk.
I am not discounting the expertise of people selling sophisticated products and services. I
am, however, pointing out that many salespeople prefer the Lone Ranger image. They
enjoy not only the challenges of representing one organization to the people of another
organization, but the image of that individual.
Salespeople (and sales managers) are thus often skeptical of any initiative that aims to
introduce analytical rigor to sales. Recall that sales has been subjected to “the usual
fixes,” which have often been as oversold as they were poorly targeted. Your salespeople
are quite likely to say, “Give me a bag and put me back on the road,” when asked to
engage in structured process improvement.
Call Out:
Leadership from sales managers is essential to getting salespeople on board with process
improvement.
For all these reasons, leadership by sales managers is essential to getting salespeople on
board—and to the success of sales process improvement. How do you go about this?
Fix salespeople’s problems: Salespeople can cite plenty of problems in the sales
process. (Just ask!) These often involve poorly targeted marketing initiatives,
lack of administrative support, poor communication with service, and so on.
They have an inherent interest in seeing these problems solved.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 28
Start with existing VOC data: Process improvement calls for data, but don’t try
to turn salespeople into “data monkeys.” Instead, ask them about their customers.
See if they can agree on the four to six major steps their customers take on their
Customer’s Journey, and determine what that means to your sales process. Also,
every company I have seen has underutilized existing VOC data. Find the data
that already exists, and start using it!
Eliminate waste ASAP: Any sales function that hasn’t been exposed to Lean
process improvement has activities that are generating waste in one form or
another. There may be obvious bottlenecks and impediments to sales. Simply
matching sales activities to the Customer Journey can prevent salespeople from
trying to get prospects to do things they are not ready to do. It can also prevent
them from wasting resources on demos, samples, and proposals on prospects who
are not ready for them. Such moves can rack up early, easy wins and demonstrate
the value of the initiative to salespeople.
Use process improvement to make selling easier: This is not a slogan, but a
goal. And if it is just a slogan, salespeople will know it. The goal of improving
the sales process should be making selling easier. If it doesn’t, then why would
(or should) salespeople support it? Their jobs are hard enough already.
When you take a true process improvement approach, what you are undergoing will seem
different. If you don’t feel some resistance to and discomfort with the method, then you
are probably not using process improvement. These approaches rely on analytical
methods familiar to few sales managers. It’s not the same old approach.
It is, however, an effective approach, although it cannot succeed without the support and
buy-in of sales managers. This requires a leap of faith, because sales differs so much
from other organizational functions. That said, these methods have such an excellent
track record in those functions—and in sales functions where they have been rigorously
applied—that it would be a shame to pass them up just because they are different and
require a bit of change and leadership to implement.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 29
Questions to Consider
What are the most common complaints from salespeople regarding leads and
prospects?
How could managing sales as a process make selling easier for my salespeople?
How have I demonstrated leadership skills that would be useful in changing the
way we approach and manage sales and marketing?
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 30
Chapter 9
Maximizing the
Likelihood of Success
Through hard-won experience, I have learned not to pursue “big bang” approaches to
applying Lean process improvement to sales. Big bangs often end with a whimper. Such
approaches call for defining the New Sales Process upfront and fomenting organizational
change. They can create unrealistic expectations, divert people from their jobs, and
command too many (or too few) resources. Also, while change can come about through
a big bang, lasting change usually occurs incrementally over time.
Yet improving the sales process must be a conscious decision and an actual initiative. It
doesn’t happen by itself. It requires changes in thinking and behavior. It requires
changes in what is measured, what is rewarded, what customers experience, and what
resources are dedicated where. You, the sales or marketing executive, cannot do it alone.
A companion piece to this document—How to Generate Revenue Growth through Lean
Process Excellence: A Guide for General Managers—speaks to the role of general
managers and business unit heads in improving the sales process. The other companion
piece—Bringing the Power of Process Improvement to Sales and Marketing: A Guide for
Process Excellence Managers—speaks to the role of quality and process improvement
specialist in these initiatives. You may want to read these documents for the perspectives
they offer. Also, the document for process improvement specialists provides more
technical information than this one and the one for general managers.
Sales managers play the linchpin role in sales process improvement. They are
responsible for the organization’s revenue, and they have the respect and trust of the
salespeople. So, here are seven things you can do as a sales manager to initiate a sales
process improvement effort and to maximize its chances of success:
1. Gain the commitment of senior management to the initiative, and buy-in from
other functions that affect the sales process, particularly marketing and customer
service.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 31
2. Approach your internal quality improvement experts or process excellence
department with a specific problem, and with a general interest in how process
improvement might apply to sales and marketing.
3. When speaking with process improvement professionals, ask them for plain
English explanations of technical terms.
4. Be sure that process experts, salespeople, and marketing people collaborate on
operational definitions and problem solving. Also, ensure that “planners” and
“doers” work together and are jointly responsible for outcomes.
5. Do not ask anyone to design a sales process for you and do not design a sales
process for salespeople to follow; you and your salespeople must fully participate
in any effort to develop a sales process.
6. Educate yourself about quality improvement and process excellence; you don’t
need to master the technical aspects, but you should be familiar with the record of
these methods, particularly in your organization.
7. Get external assistance from people experienced in applying process excellence to
sales; external experts provide experience gained in prior client engagements as
well as objectivity that’s impossible to access in-house; they can also help to
resolve, or at least clarify, internal conflicts.
Finally, there is no single set of steps that works in every company, because every
organization has unique circumstances, and unique personalities as well. Therefore, it’s
best to develop an approach that works in your specific circumstances. However, as long
as you are creating value for customers and for your company, managing on data and
facts, experimenting and continuously improving, you will be moving in the right
direction. This movement will position you to achieve gains in sales productivity and
results which you did not believe possible, and which are in fact not possible with other
methods.
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 32
Questions to Consider
How would I rate my sales and marketing organization’s readiness to manage
sales as a process (e.g., high, medium, low)?
How would I rate my larger organization’s readiness?
How would I rate my own readiness?
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 33
Is Your Organization Ready for Lean Process Excellence?
If you would like more information about the topic of this paper, we have prepared a
website devoted to it: www.salesperformance.com, where you will find several years’
worth of articles, case examples, and blog postings.
Next Steps to Consider
Suggest that your President or General Manager order and read How to Grow
Your Business Through Lean Process Improvement in Sales and Marketing – A
Guide for Chief Executives and Business Unit Leaders, the companion volume
written specifically for company executives.
Suggest that your head of quality improvement or Lean Process Excellence order
and read How to Bring the Power of Lean Process Excellence to Sales and
Marketing, the companion volume written specifically for them.
Contact SPC to see how we can help your team with this important objective.
Please include:
- Your sales organization’s size, market geography and industry
- Specific UDRs and challenges you are facing
- What attempts you have made to overcome those challenges
- What you would like SPC to do for you
Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. • 877-784-6507 • [email protected]
345 Banyon Brook Pt, Roswell GA, 30076 • www.salesperformance.com
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 34
About Michael J. Webb
Michael J. Webb, President of Sales Performance Consultants, Inc., founded the company after a
lengthy career in field sales, sales management, and sales training. In addition to deep sales and
sales management experience, Mike has held professional certification in production and
inventory management and quality management, and holds a B.S. in mathematics from
Southeastern Missouri State University. Mike is the author of Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma
Way (Kaplan, 2006), a pioneer in applying quality and process improvement methods to sales and
marketing, and a frequent speaker at quality and process improvement events.
About Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.
Founded in 2002, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. helps companies with business-to-business
(B2B) sales organizations who want to improve their processes for finding, winning, and keeping
customers. Built on Lean and process excellence platforms common to many companies, SPC’s
proprietary methods address the challenges of selling in global markets, managing dispersed sales
teams, and working effectively with channel partners and in complex distribution systems.
Mike and his team have helped divisions of DuPont, Pentair, Tyco, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and
dozens of other companies to identify bottlenecks, eliminate waste, improve sales results, reduce
sales costs, and compress time to market. Our goal is never process for the sake of process, but
improvements to sales processes that enable companies to find more of the right customers at
lower costs and higher margins.