According to CSO Insights, the percentage of salespeople meeting or exceeding quota has declined for five years in a row! If you are responsible for B2B sales and marketing, that statistic should take your breath away. How can it be? There were more than 1700 B2B companies in those studies. It is not like they […]
Do highly successful companies use process management tools in marketing and sales? You bet they do. Whether they know they are doing it is another matter, however. In fact, when companies TRY to apply lean and process tools to sales and marketing, they often get it wrong. Read this and you’ll get it right.
You cannot win sales manager’s (or salespeople’s) hearts and minds unless you can help them sell. This requires getting inside their skin, and helping them define their problems in more productive ways. Their hearts and minds will follow.
A General Management reader asked: “How can Lean in sales and marketing allocate scarce resources wisely?” This great question because, at the heart of things, improving the organization’s performance isn’t just about reducing waste. You are looking for evidence of what the customer values as well, and this can be tricky.
Lean is about relentlessly increasing productivity. This doesn’t just mean eliminating waste. It also means increasing the value perceived by the customer. Lean thinking begins with what the customer wants, and works backwards from there. Accordingly there are four major differences between a Lean approach to sales and marketing, and traditional approaches you might be familiar with:
Question: “How do you get other people to see that Lean and Six Sigma are not just for manufacturing functions?” Answer: Stop talking about Lean and Six Sigma!
Lean process excellence enable leaders and managers to identify and gather data, distinguish value from waste, and fix sales and marketing problems quickly.
Many lean practitioners poke around the sales department because it is interesting. Michael Webb illustrates what is required to do this successfully.
Michael Webb presents readers with five best practices in sales and marketing that are parallel with best practices for the lean journey in production.
Ways to think about sales and marketing that make identifying and eliminating waste easier.