Hello,

A few months ago, two sales managers, I’ll call them Frank and Betty, were stymied by a serious problem. They knew how to make their numbers, yet results weren’t happening.

Although their company was small, they had created a management system as sophisticated as those of much larger companies. However, they made one fatal mistake. (more…)

April 29th, 2008 Posted to Blog | Comments (1)

Hello,

I’m on a quick trip up to New Jersey and back, but wanted to get this story off to you.

If you’ve been a salesperson, you’ve felt the pressure of needing to get customers to buy. You’ve also known the frustration of not having the knowledge, resources, time, or the tools to do the job properly. If you’ve been a sales manager, you may have tried to get your company to invest in some of those resources and tools. However, you probably had a hard time “proving” the value of those tools in the end. (more…)

April 22nd, 2008 Posted to Blog | Comments (1)

Hello,

Who is your favorite heroic historical figure?

I never thought I would be this way, but in recent years I’ve found biographies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Isaac Newton, and others to be fascinating. Once you’ve been out of school for a while, I guess you develop more of an appreciation of what it took to accomplish what they did.

For example, I’m reading a biography of Richard Feynman right now (Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick, Vintage Press, 1992) http://tinyurl.com/5sofny.

Feynman’s experience in WWII as part of the team that developed the atom bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, was dramatically different than that of Freeman Dyson, a British subject and another math whiz. Check this out:

Dyson’s war could hardly have been more different from Feynman’s. The British … assigned him to the Royal Air Force bomber command in a Buckinghamshire forest, where he researched statistical studies that were doomed, when they countered the official wisdom, to be ignored. … He and others in the operational research section learned—contrary to the essential bomber command dogma—that the safety of bomber crews did not increase with experience, that escape hatches were too narrow for airmen to use in emergencies; that gun turrets slowed the aircraft and bloated the crew sizes without increasing the chances of surviving enemy fighters, and that the entire British strategic bombing campaign was a failure.

Imagine not just struggling to help your company succeed, but fighting battles where people died instead of being laid off. Then, imagine that your work proves that many of the cherished beliefs of your superiors were not just mistaken, but they were continuing to kill people on a daily basis!

This reminded me of three things:

First was the great example in Peter R. Scholte’s “The Leader’s Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done” http://tinyurl.com/6jrj5k, where the generals in the Israeli army punished the pilots when they did badly and rewarded them when they did well. The generals were not surprised that when they punished people their performance went up. But they were amazed that when they rewarded
people, their performance was worse. Naturally, they decided to stop rewarding people! Makes perfect sense, right? (Unbeknownst to the generals, the pilots were in the clutches of normal variation; systemic variables beyond their control. Reward them, punish them, it really didn’t matter. … Sound like any salespeople you know? It does to me!)

Second, it reminded me of Ian Ayre’s book “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart” http://tinyurl.com/5urpho. Ayre provides numerous examples, especially in compelling fields like medicine, where strangely, the scientific method still, to this day, is barely starting to take hold. He shows how time and again the measurement of actual events and outcomes in
organizations reveals things that run counter to the leader’s awareness and beliefs.

Taking pains with your business to measure what actually happens with customers is a huge source of profit and competitive advantage in companies today. Marketing and lead generation provide enormous opportunities to start uncovering what customers want, what they react to, and what they don’t react to. For example, Flint McLaughlin at www.MarketingExperiments.com is a big believer in measurements, as marketers should be. He is conducting a webinar this week on the topic, as a matter of fact, and I highly recommend his materials.

Most marketers suffer from a lack of systems thinking, although it is often not their fault. As I have written previously, their organizations force them into a sort of functional view, where they are evaluated on the quantity of “leads” they produce rather than the quality of them. (A guaranteed way to waste money.)

The approach required for systems thinking in marketing and selling is to carefully define the qualities that make up highly qualified opportunities. As I have also written before in this space, my clients routinely learn powerful things when they take a scientific approach to their qualification criteria (see Chapter 5 of “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way,” for example). Think you are better at closing technically sophisticated prospects as opposed to unsophisticated ones? More often than not, what you think you know is not so at all. Better check your facts: I’ve never had a client who didn’t learn something huge when they tested theories such as these.

Measuring the observable characteristics of opportunities in the field and correlating them to whether the deals are won or lost is like getting Freeman Dyson’s British bosses to listen up to the facts about their lousy bombing strategies!

Those kinds of things can really change the outcome of a war.

Until next week,

Michael J. Webb
April 15, 2008
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How to Turn Your Sales and Marketing Into a Lean Six Sigma Production Machine That Runs Like Clockwork (And Do It in a Way Your Salespeople Will Love!)
https://www.salesperformance.com/ExecBriefing.aspx

Hello everyone,

Running between some vacation days and client appointments this week, I was interviewed by Forrester Research late last week on the topic of how to get sales and marketing to cooperate better. This week’s article deals with that very issue. Originally published in RainToday a couple of years ago, it’s worth revisiting.

Until next week.

Michael Webb
April 9, 2008
www.salesperformance.com

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Root Out the Marketing and Selling Disconnect

Originally published Aug. 3, 2005, on www.raintoday.com

The VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing were squared off in a debate about how to invest the sales and marketing budget for the coming year.

• Sales VP: “I want to create a new position and hire a Director of Sales and five additional salespeople.”
• Marketing VP: “I want to invest in a marketing and advertising campaign to make the B2B brand stronger.”

If the budget allows one or the other, but not both, which is the right decision to make? Isn’t this a “chicken or egg” dilemma? Which comes first—sales or branding? Is there even a solution to this perennial problem?

You bet there is. To see it, you have to get to the root of the problem, which is this:

Which choice will create more value for the customer?

What Value Does Your Sales Process Create?
Self-interest makes prospects read headlines and respond to promotions. Decision makers are influenced by what’s in it for their companies and for themselves. As individuals, marketers and sellers work hard to identify the self-interest of prospects and customers so they can be valuable to them.

Too bad most businesses don’t see the purpose of marketing and selling in terms of their value to the customer. Instead, they traditionally see marketing, selling, and servicing as activities with separate purposes. Marketing designs communications about the company and its products and “gets the word out” via branding and market-awareness exercises. The sales force turns over rocks trying to find opportunities to make their quotas. The service department tries to respond to customer needs while staying within budget. Each department essentially fends for itself.

This approach sub optimizes results because that is what it is designed to do! It spawns conflicts over resources because of its faulty assumptions about what marketing, selling, and servicing really do.

Anything Not Creating Value for the Customer Is Waste
Companies would become a lot more effective and efficient (not to mention more profitable) if they designed their marketing, selling, and servicing activities to solve the prospect’s or customer’s problems instead of pushing their product or touting their “brand.”

Do you know what hinders people in your marketplace from doing what they want to be doing? Do you know what it costs them to deal with those problems, and what work-arounds they use? You should. You should also know how your company’s offer can alleviate those problems. Answering these questions is the key to getting people to:

•  Read your advertisements
•  Take actions such as inquiring for more information or opting-in to some offer
•  Take your salespeople’s calls and share information
•  Consider salespeople’s proposals seriously
•  Buy your company’s solutions

The work of your company’s marketing, selling, and servicing departments should be a production system designed to generate actions like these. If it does, you are creating value. If people don’t take the actions you want them to, what you are producing is waste.

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How to Turn Your Sales and Marketing Into a Lean Six Sigma Production Machine That Runs Like Clockwork (And Do It in a Way Your Salespeople Will Love!)
https://www.salesperformance.com/ExecBriefing.aspx
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The Goal: Making Money Now and in the Future
Marketing, selling, and servicing are a production system for finding, gaining, and keeping the right customers by solving problems for them so they can make more money. You might initiate promotions, hoping prospects will respond. Or, perhaps you react when prospects take certain actions. Either way this production system must have a procedure with measurable steps.

In such an environment, marketing is anything that makes sales easier. Marketing should be analogous to engineering: it must find the niches in the market and develop the most efficient ways of mining them. Sales are like production, implementing the activities that cannot be automated. The analytical tools of the quality movement can and should be leveraged to identify causes of bottlenecks and variations in this production process so corrective actions can be taken.

Operating this way is the key to an ever-growing stream of profitable business. It is also the best defense against changing markets, competition, and technologies.

Root Out The Dilemma
If marketing, selling, and servicing are seen in terms of producing value for the customer, so-called “conflicts” between marketing and sales dissolve easily. Let’s consider the “conflicting” goals again:

• Sales VP: “I want to create a new position and hire a Director of Sales and five additional salespeople.”
• Marketing VP: “I want to invest in a marketing and advertising campaign to make the B2B brand stronger.”

What value will either of these actions create for prospects, clients, or customers? What actions will they take as a result? How can you measure it? Chances are, both executives will have to do some thinking to answer those questions. That is good because the result of their discussion might be the first time they have actually identified their production system (aka, their sales process). In addition, it will cause them to design an approach that creates value for customers, so customers are more likely to follow it.

Once they have a process customers follow, improving results is a matter of doing experiments. It is likely that some entirely different ideas would surface for improving results. Regardless of what they decide to do, they should be able to run two slightly different processes side by side (or sequentially) and be able to measure the result. Hire one or two salespeople or test part of a brand campaign in one market segment. Measure the results.

Improved results are proof you are on the right track, and provide valuable feedback on what your market wants. Best of all, this establishes a framework for  measuring and maximizing the talents of marketing, sales, and service people in the service of the customer, as well as to your own company.

Michael J. Webb
April 9, 2008

I had lunch last Thursday with a very smart woman who just started a six-figure executive sales position in a health-care company. She seemed a little frazzled as she described the sales process at the new company: “It’s like, ‘Oh Boy. Everyone Go Sell!’” she said. It had taken her a week to figure out things such as which six people had to approve client proposals, who last worked on the hospital account she was calling on, and how to submit expenses. She found another salesperson that supposedly had developed a customer-oriented “sales process” on her own, only to be told it was not for general sharing. (more…)