Atlanta, Ga, October 31, 2008 - B2B companies are searching for better ways to find more revenue with fewer resources. A corporation in Atlanta will announce a new way of reaching this objective: The Sales Kaizen Event, based on the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. Teleseminar to be held Wed November 5, 2008, 3:00 pm Eastern. www.saleskaizen.com

PRWEB – http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/10/prweb1547074.htm

 

Everybody seems to be holding their breath for the election. That makes tough times for sales and marketing departments.  

The economic downturn makes things worse.

 

That also means there is no better time than right now to step back and fix that broken sales process. (more…)

Last week I pointed out that the social networks phenomenon is relevant to sales and marketing and that it has a lot of potential value to business people. This week, let’s consider a relatively new and very interesting social network: www.twitter.com. Twitter communicates short messages, tiny postings (limited to 140 characters). The idea is to provide a way for people to answer the most common query between friends: “What’ya doing?” (more…)

Social networks are noisily having such an impact on the Internet and on sales and marketing in general, so I’ve been checking them out. If you are already familiar with Linked-In or Twitter, for example, you might wonder what took me so long. If you are like a lot of other people, however, your BS detectors may be on alert.  (more…)

Bill Zeeb from Switzerland wrote me last Friday afternoon to say:

           "… the education piece this week, while hitting home, drifts from your sales focus."

Trust me, Bill, in part 2 below, things will come into focus again!

In fact, the lesson in here is one of the most important in all of sales and marketing management.

Let me know if you don't agree!

Michael Webb

October 7, 2008  

 _____________________________________________________

Engineers, Inner City Schools, and Gaining Salespeople's
Cooperation: Part 2

Last week I told you about Dean Kamen, the brilliant inventor and entrepreneur, and what you can learn from him about leading your sales and marketing organization.  This week I will discuss strategies that you can implement to change the culture of your sales organization and gain the cooperation and support of your salespeople.

Gaining Salespeople's Cooperation

Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you to have your salespeople join a robotics competition or even have a sales contest.

I am going to say that, as the leader of the organization, you have within your grasp the levers to completely change the culture of your sales organization. All it requires is that you change your own management focus just a tiny bit.

You see, there are two mistakes I constantly see senior executives making when it comes to the sales process:

1.     The first mistake is allowing the sales process to be focused inwardly while ignoring the customer's actions and especially why the customer should take the actions you want them to take.

2.     The second mistake is leaving implementation up to the sales team alone. Once a workable sales process is set up (with credible offers for each step of the Customer's Journey), executives continue to manage and measure things the old-fashioned way.

In our business culture here in the U.S., the "old-fashioned way" of managing means putting a minor amount of attention into planning the work and a great deal of effort into DOING the work. Most companies have highly intelligent, highly educated, and highly motivated sales teams who are diligently working their asses off.

So, if results aren't what they hoped for in the end, well, then what?

Most managers and salespeople aren't sure, figuring they'll cross that bridge when they come to it or some such thing. Maybe they'll fall back on the usual fixes, trying various essentially random things.

And that is the problem!

Deming's PDCA to the Rescue

Rather than leaving the implementation of the sales process up to the sales team and hoping for the best, I advise executives to work through the process with field salespeople in a more rigorous fashion modeled after Deming's Plan, Do, Check, Act approach.

Once you get the hang of it, applying PDCA to your regular sales meetings is deceptively simple and extremely powerful. That's because it addresses some of our important cultural biases head on:

- Only results count.
Nothing could be farther from the truth! The entire issue of improving results is one of understanding exactly what activities are necessary to create them. The bias some executives have for "spare me the details" is misplaced when it comes to launching any kind of change or improvement in a sales process.
- There is no point in analyzing things.
Again, wrong! The point is to bring salespeople together to learn from each other's experiences. They must develop a precise language for understanding a myriad of nuances in their environment, so they can distinguish the fundamental issues from the trivial ones.
- Everybody already knows what they are doing.
Wrong again! I don't mean to be insulting, but I do mean to challenge you on this point: Until you and your team have been through a process exercise and meticulously begun to track and measure your activities and results, you only think you know what you are doing.

The PDCA approach enables management to create a cultural bias toward scientific, organized, and rational ways of doing things.

I can guarantee you there are important nuances everyone on your team has been overlooking, because in most companies the sales culture is biased toward action and against analysis. We'll charge up whatever hill we are told, absorbing the bumps and bruises of customer's rejection every step of the way.

What we won't do is step back to figure out whether this is the right hill to be charging up!

_______________________________________________________________________

Second Edition just released-completely revised:
Turn Your Sales and Marketing
into a Predictable Money Machine
(and do it in a way your salespeople will love!)
www.salesperformance.com/ExecBriefing.aspx
_______________________________________________________________________

Gaining Salespeople's Cooperation

As our firm has applied PDCA to various sales process improvement teams, we have been amazed by the degree to which salespeople want and need to discuss the nuances and details of their situations. When people are challenging the meaning of terms, it means they are taking things seriously. We hear questions like:

·     "Exactly when can I count this as a lead?"

·     "What happens if the lead goes cold; do I have to subtract it from the total?"

·     "Are we putting the list of our active prospects on the report every week, or just the ones that became active during this week?"  

Everyone on the sales team sees each other's attempts to reach their targets and understand precisely what the language means. They hear about each other's frustrations-both with their customers and with their own company's mistakes.

This amplifies the "band of brothers" environment, effectively making them more of a team, committing each other to achieving what they say they'll achieve. It provides opportunities to credibly celebrate the many "small victories" that are so essential to achieving truly difficult sales goals.

Further, the approach provides hard data evidence, meeting after meeting, of what is actually happening in the field so executives can separate the actionable issues affecting everyone from the trivial details affecting only a few.

This is the key to the power of this approach: It causes salespeople to realize that management is really listening to them.

When you were a kid in some conflict with an authority figure, do you remember how much it meant when they acknowledged you were right about something? Even small changes that management undertakes as a result of the insights gathered in an objective and systematic way from salespeople has a profoundly motivating effect on the field sales team.

I will guarantee you this: When you conduct meetings in this way after a process improvement session, you'll get more insight, improvement, and cooperation from the sales team than you have ever seen after a traditional sales training initiative.  

 

Bill Zeeb from Switzerland wrote me last Friday afternoon to say:

           “… The education piece this week, while hitting home, drifts from your sales focus.”

Trust me, Bill, in part 2 below, things will come into focus again! (more…)

Dean Kamen is an engineering genius. What many people don't realize is that he is also a genius as a salesman. Below is link to three killer videos illustrating what I mean.*

 

First: Two Videos

 

If you haven't seen these before, get ready to be mesmerized as Dean tells the story of developing a "Luke Skywalker-style" artificial limb (at the request of the Defense Department) to help maimed solders returning from Iraq. (And this is just one of the technological breakthroughs he and his team are credited with!)  Click Here to View these Videos.

 

Second: What Kind of Problem Are We Talking About?

 

Eleven minutes into the second video, Walt Mossberg (of The Wall Street Journal) asks Dean to shift gears and discuss another of his passions: Motivating more young people to become engineers.

In the last two minutes of this video, Dean points out the familiar problems of the U.S. public school system, where only 70% of the students (at best) even graduate from high school despite the billions of dollars spent to improve it.

 

Then Dean says something absolutely brilliant:

"I realized that … lots of people will talk about changing the schools, charter schools, better funding and training of teachers, and everything else on the supply side of this …

 

"But there's a fundamental problem … which is that there's no demand in our culture among kids [especially for children in the inner cities] … to become technically educated and competent. …

 

"I decided that … it must not be … a supply problem, instead it is a demand problem …

 

"It is not an education problem, it is a culture problem. We're the only culture on the planet where by the time [inner city kids] are eight years old virtually all minorities [and] women have been convinced that science and engineering is either beyond their reach, or too geeky and unattractive to do. …"

Think about all these people culturally rejecting math and science, for a minute. My friend, Senior Consultant Robert Ferguson, reminded me what this problem really means:

 

"A byproduct of avoiding math-oriented curricula and hard things like that is an innumerate society. A million and a billion become the same to people. There is no longer any statistical relevance to information, no filtering, and no proportionality. People sign loan contracts with balloon clauses and can't predict what will happen to them. Leaders try to socialize risk to protect an innumerate society. The 30% who do not graduate are given affordable housing they cannot afford. It is much worse than no engineers."

 

"And, here's the myth: that improvement naturally happens as time goes by and people in the organization get smarter. It is not true because there is entropy, degradation at the same time as people leave, training lags, key knowledge holders move on. The small anecdotal improvements get beer time celebration while slippage is ignored, thus reinforcing that 'we are getting better.' You need a system to hold gains while driving improvement at a certain measurable pace."

 

You can see the problem Dean has zeroed in on is truly one of the root causes in our civilization.

So, once Dean spotted the problem, what did he do about it?

 

Founding F.I.R.S.T.

 

"So," Dean continues, "… look, given the cards that we were dealt, in a media-driven culture … [where people do what they celebrate ...] where young kids will do what young adults do, let's turn science, engineering, mathematics, technology, and problem solving into … a fun sport."

 

The result was the founding of F.I.R.S.T. ("For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology"), whose vision is:  

 

"To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes."

 

Started in 1992 with 28 companies in a New Hampshire gymnasium, F.I.R.S.T.has grown into an organization that reaches 150,000 kids every year and whose championship events are so large they must be held in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta!

_______________________________________________________________________

Second Edition just released-completely revised:
Turn Your Sales and Marketing
into a Predictable Money Machine
(and do it in a way your salespeople will love!)
www.salesperformance.com/ExecBriefing.aspx
_______________________________________________________________________

 

Leading Your Sales Organization

 

What does this have to do with leading your sales organization?

 

Just about everything, actually.

 

Think about it: Almost every company in North America is faced with huge sales and marketing challenges. The quality movement and Six Sigma have wrung virtually all the savings out of the manufacturing operation. Senior executives are looking hard to find ways of making sales and marketing more measurable and more efficient.

More than one senior executive has told me that in the companies they've worked for, sales and marketing is so screwed up, they just know there has to be a better way to manage it.

 

This leads them down the path of trying to be scientific. Companies have spent billions on CRM systems and sales training, all in attempts to "improve their sales process."

 

They're trying to go down a path that leads salespeople to be more consistent, more structured, and to provide more information about their activities. Heck, entire companies, like Siebel Systems, for example, were built on the idea that management should be able to know what salespeople are doing in the field.  

 

Yet, if your sales team is like most, there are many among them whose reaction is similar to your local empty lot basketball team: "Yea, right! That's too time-consuming, too geeky, too troublesome, and it doesn't help me sell." What they don't say out loud is "You can forget it."

 

Leading most sales process initiatives is like juggling Jello: Lip service is everywhere, but action-and especially results based on that action-is definitely not.

 

The problem is not a supply problem. It's a demand problem! There is no demand in the sales culture to be more structured and provide more data. Heck, people sometimes take sales jobs in order to avoid having to be analytical!

 

So, how do you solve this dilemma? Next week in Part 2, I will discuss strategies that you can implement to change the culture of your sales organization and gain the cooperation and support of your salespeople.

 

Michael J. Webb
October 3, 2008

 

*The videos were released by All Things Digital (The Wall Street Journal's website devoted to news, analysis, and opinion on technology. (The link is to Gizmodo because it is easier to find and watch them there.)

 

Dean Kamen is an engineering genius. What many people don’t realize is that he is also a genius as a salesman. Below is link to three killer videos illustrating what I mean.*

First: Two Videos

 

If you haven’t seen these before, get ready to be mesmerized as Dean tells the story of developing a “Luke Skywalker-style” artificial limb (at the request of the Defense Department) to help maimed solders returning from Iraq. (And this is just one of the technological breakthroughs he and his team are credited with!)  Click Here to View these Videos.

 

Second: What Kind of Problem Are We Talking About?

Eleven minutes into the second video, Walt Mossberg (of The Wall Street Journal) asks Dean to shift gears and discuss another of his passions: Motivating more young people to become engineers.

 

In the last two minutes of this video, Dean points out the familiar problems of the U.S. public school system, where only 70% of the students (at best) even graduate from high school despite the billions of dollars spent to improve it.

 

Then Dean says something absolutely brilliant:

 

“I realized that … lots of people will talk about changing the schools, charter schools, better funding and training of teachers, and everything else on the supply side of this …

 

“But there’s a fundamental problem; … which is that there’s no demand in our culture among kids [especially for children in the inner cities] … to become technically educated and competent. …

 

 ”I decided that … it must not be … a supply problem, instead it is a demand problem …

 

 ”It is not an education problem, it is a culture problem. We’re the only culture on the planet where by the time [inner city kids] are eight years old virtually all minorities [and] women have been convinced that science and engineering is either beyond their reach, or too geeky and unattractive to do. …”

 

Think about all these people culturally rejecting math and science, for a minute. My friend, Senior Consultant Robert Ferguson, reminded me what this problem really means:

 

 ”A byproduct of avoiding math-oriented curricula and hard things like that is an innumerate society. A million and a billion become the same to people. There is no longer any statistical relevance to information, no filtering, and no proportionality. People sign loan contracts with balloon clauses and can’t predict what will happen to them. Leaders try to socialize risk to protect an innumerate society. The 30% who do not graduate are given affordable housing they cannot afford. It is much worse than no engineers.”

 

 ”And, here’s the myth: that improvement naturally happens as time goes by and people in the organization get smarter. It is not true because there is entropy, degradation at the same time as people leave, training lags, key knowledge holders move on. The small anecdotal improvements get beer time celebration while slippage is ignored, thus reinforcing that ‘we are getting better.’ You need a system to hold gains while driving improvement at a certain measurable pace.”

You can see the problem Dean has zeroed in on is truly one of the root causes in our civilization.

 

So, once Dean spotted the problem, what did he do about it?

 

Founding F.I.R.S.T.

 

 So,” Dean continues, “… look, given the cards that we were dealt, in a media-driven culture … [where people do what they celebrate ...] where young kids will do what young adults do, let’s turn science, engineering, mathematics, technology, and problem solving into … a fun sport.”

The result was the founding of F.I.R.S.T. (“For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”), whose vision is: 

“To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes.”

Started in 1992 with 28 companies in a New Hampshire gymnasium, F.I.R.S.T.has grown into an organization that reaches 150,000 kids every year and whose championship events are so large they must be held in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta!

_______________________________________________________________________

 

Second Edition just released-completely revised:
Turn Your Sales and Marketing
into a Predictable Money Machine
(and do it in a way your salespeople will love!)
www.salesperformance.com/ExecBriefing.aspx
_______________________________________________________________________

 

Leading Your Sales Organization

 

What does this have to do with leading your sales organization?

Just about everything, actually.

 

Think about it: Almost every company in North America is faced with huge sales and marketing challenges. The quality movement and Six Sigma have wrung virtually all the savings out of the manufacturing operation. Senior executives are looking hard to find ways of making sales and marketing more measurable and more efficient.

 

More than one senior executive has told me that in the companies they’ve worked for, sales and marketing is so screwed up, they just know there has to be a better way to manage it.

 

This leads them down the path of trying to be scientific. Companies have spent billions on CRM systems and sales training, all in attempts to “improve their sales process.”

They’re trying to go down a path that leads salespeople to be more consistent, more structured, and to provide more information about their activities. Heck, entire companies, like Siebel Systems, for example, were built on the idea that management should be able to know what salespeople are doing in the field. 

 

Yet, if your sales team is like most, there are many among them whose reaction is similar to your local empty lot basketball team: “Yea, right! That’s too time-consuming, too geeky, too troublesome, and it doesn’t help me sell.” What they don’t say out loud is “You can forget it.”

 

Leading most sales process initiatives is like juggling Jell-O: Lip service is everywhere, but action-and especially results based on that action-is definitely not.

 

The problem is not a supply problem. It’s a demand problem! There is no demand in the sales culture to be more structured and provide more data. Heck, people sometimes take sales jobs in order to avoid having to be analytical!

So, how do you solve this dilemma? Next week in Part 2, I will discuss strategies that you can implement to change the culture of your sales organization and gain the cooperation and support of your salespeople.

 

Michael J. Webb
October 3, 2008

 

*The videos were released by All Things Digital (The Wall Street Journal’s website devoted to news, analysis, and opinion on technology. (The link is to Gizmodo because it is easier to find and watch them there.)