Alan_Timothy
Posts 31
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I would like to pose a radical proposition, Selling should be a reproducible process, ie. Sales People should be doing repoducible activities, which is just like in a production environment is it not? In production environments there is a lot experience with Statistical Process Improvement ie. how do you optimise the process in a reproducible way, measure it and most importantly continually improve it.
Based on the above premise, and this is supported by the 3.8 million field visits in our data base (www.i-snapshot.com), you can drive significant improvements in a teams effectiveness and efficiency based on field data collected. Our experience proves that many simple measures such as basic activity rate for each seller, followed by customer/prospect type have have a significant impact across a team, and if you do not start with these 'lead indicators' then the more complex 'lag' indicators become secondary ie. if you are not seeing enough customers then what you do when in will not make up for the poor activity.
Why are Sales Managers in this current economic climate so slow in learning from the experience from their peers in Production and seeking out best practice and making a real difference to their performance and their companies performance?
Embrace the data, embrace the process and model and move the needle
Alan Timothy
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NeilWarren
Posts 645
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Hi Alan
Interesting. I’m coming at this issue from the other angle of looking at what sales activities are “broken”, and cannot be improved. The analogy with the production line being that one of the collection bins has collapsed, so cranking up the speed of the line will only result in an even bigger pile of discards at that point.
For me, as a buyer on the receiving end, I have to say that either the automated/recorded cold telephone calls, or those with a real human but lousy targeting/relevance and script, are definitely not a good sales activity, regardless of whether you can make 100 telephone “lifts” a day, or 1,000,000.
So, transfer that to physical visits, and I’d have to first of all ask what type of visit you have in mind – and for what type of product or service? Because if it were a rep from a solicitors firm, knocking on my door to see if I had had a trip or fall at work recently, or , in fact, the 6th rep that day asking the same question, I suspect their stats would start to reflect an increase in “accidents” at work (like broken noses) for their own workforce!
I agree otherwise, absolutely, that once we have qualified leads or are dealing with existing accounts and cross or up-selling, then efficiencies and best practice in how we work, including volume and regularity of visits, product offerings, etc., will offer maximisation possibilities that could be off the scale. And here the production line analogy would look more like replacing some Heath Robinson, steam driven, total mess of pulleys, string and sticky tape with an A-B streamlined super-system.
Do you therefore have comparisons and insights into what works for opening new accounts versus maximizing the effects on existing customers?
Best - Neil
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