After 13 Years, The Shingo Award

Back in 1996, after 20 years in industry, I was tired of working sixty hours per week as a salesman and sales manager for people who cared if I made my number, but couldn’t assess the odds I faced or if I was doing a good a job.

The worst part was when my employers kept throwing roadblocks in the way of their own success. Anyone who has attempted to change a sales force from selling “products” to selling “solutions” knows the kind of things I’m talking about.

The last straw was overcoming those roadblocks only to learn the company changed its mind about what it wanted after all. That happened to me twice. It took six years in one big firm, three in a much smaller one.

So, I decided to transition from being an expendable resource to being a revenue generating asset. I spent seven years with a really great sales training company (www.IMPAXcorp.com). Professionally, it was tremendously challenging. Personally, it was rewarding. And although I loved working there, I learned I wasn’t a sales trainer at heart.

All these first-hand experiences had taught me something disturbing: The way most executives thought about how to manage sales and marketing was deeply flawed.

I had figured out that “sales process” didn’t belong along side sales training, CRM, or territory alignment as something companies needed to deal with. Process thinking was more fundamental than that. It was the foundation that explained how all those other things worked.

I hadn’t yet figured out the full picture, but I knew the future was in process thinking.

Reluctantly, I left the security of a paycheck to work on creating clients around sales process improvement. It had to be the right move in the long run. Any other path would have been harder, for me anyway. I would just have to figure out how to get through the short run challenges.

And there have been 13 years worth of those, which I’ll write about another time.

For now, I am proud to announce that the Shingo Institute has awarded Sales Process Excellence the Shingo Research and Publication Award for 2015.

It is the first time in their 27 year history that the award has been given to a book on B2B sales and marketing.

The examiner’s feedback is gratifying.

It confirms what I concluded long ago: Sales and marketing people are not allergic to process thinking. They are allergic to the bad management that results from a lack of thinking clearly. And that happens because no one has explained why sales and marketing needs process excellence, and how it changes and improves sales and marketing management. Sales Process Excellence was thirteen years in the making. I can guarantee that adopting even a few of its ideas and methods will create improvement in your company.

Visit www.salesprocessexcellence.com today, to get your copy or download the Intro and Chapter One for free. Let me know what YOU think!

Michael Webb