Management Breakthrough Transforms Sales and Marketing into More Predictable Production Flow
Increasing the flow of profitable business seems an elusive goal for many companies. Although management techniques such as Lean and Six Sigma have helped to dramatically improve business results in production manufacturing, many companies have been frustrated when trying them in the world of branding campaigns, lead generation, sales training, and sales contests.
Now, after five years of research and experience with clients, I am pleased to announce a system that reveals:
- How to define the best practices of marketing and selling in a language that is consistent with process thinking
- How to tie activities and results together in a single production system
- How to measure that production system in a way similar to how WIP is measured in production manufacturing
- How to use those measurements to diagnose–and fix–bottlenecks
- How to enable people within an organization to achieve a common vision and common goals and to move successfully toward those goals
This is a management breakthrough for senior executives who are committed to Lean and Six Sigma management principles and is described in my new Executive Briefing entitled:
“How to Turn Your Sales and Marketing
into a Lean Six Sigma Money Production Machine
That Runs Like Clockwork
(And Do It in a Way Your Salespeople Will Love!)”
How did I arrive at this system? Applying Lean and Six Sigma to sales and marketing is challenging if you assume that all you are producing is customer orders. That makes you think you can “fix” the process by “fixing the salespeople,” and results in absurd strategies, such as trying to do time and motion studies of salespeople in an attempt to improve revenue
I believe such myopic perspectives assume the only thing that matters is what salespeople do. Although salespeople play an important role, there are many other factors at play. Failing to identify and deal with those other factors usually results in frustration and contributes to the “mystery” of sales and marketing.
Companies finally discovered that the primary way to improve manufacturing productivity was to identify what thing would and would not create value for the customer. Interestingly, the problem is exactly the same in sales and marketing.
Obviously, orders are an output of the sales process. However, they are not the only output. For example, customers place orders only when there is some reason for them to do so. Therefore, a critical output of the sales process is to provide them with those reasons.
In fact, the best way to design (and improve) a sale process is to think of marketing and selling as a service you extend to the market, one that is paid for by prospects and customers with their attention, their time, and ultimately their money. It is, in fact, a production process, where you can measure the value being created in terms of the actions you get customers to take. You can’t improve it by examining salespeople’s or marketing’s activities alone. You have to also understand the value to the customer at each stage.
That is why the approach we’ve used with clients (which is described in the Executive Briefing) is so well received by salespeople and marketers. This approach has also been successful at producing the information needed to identify bottlenecks and waste and has improved overall business results as well.
For more information on the Executive Briefing, visit the following URL:
https://salesperformance.com/ExecBriefing.aspx
Michael J. Webb
July 10, 2007
