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Make Your Sales Funnel
Flow Faster, And Win More of the Right Customers
Through Sales Process Excellence
A Guide for Sales and Marketing Managers
by
Michael J. Webb, President Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.
Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.
Roswell, GA 30076
(877) 784-6507
www.salesperformance.com
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 2
Make Your Sales Funnel
Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers
Through Sales Process Excellence
Contents
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 3
Beyond the Numbers Game ................................................................................................ 5
Five Reasons to Consider Doing Things Differently ...................................................... 7
B2B Case Example ............................................................................................................. 9
Next Steps to Consider...................................................................................................... 15
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 3
Introduction
Companies that have implemented Lean process excellence have grown revenues and
profits through faster lead times as well as reduced waste and quality problems. These
have been achieved in a variety of functions – from receiving, through production, and
even back-office functions such as accounting and payroll.
As a sales and marketing manager however, you may be skeptical about applying quality
and process improvement to your area. That is understandable. The approach differs
sharply from how companies traditionally address sales problems, with tools like sales
training, CRM software programs, incentive compensation schemes, lead generation and
promotional campaigns, and so on.
How valuable would it be if marketing campaigns were coordinated to produce real
prospects, administrative tasks and internal bottlenecks were reduced, and the way your
team worked made you confident you could achieve revenue targets?
As a former sales manager and sales trainer, I understand sales, customer buying
processes, and organizational impediments to increased sales performance. I know that
marketing campaigns lack coordination, lead generation often fails, administrative tasks
waste time, bottlenecks frustrate salespeople, and monthly revenue demands keep sales
managers and salespeople under constant stress. I also understand how process
improvement can position you to solve most of the problems you face.
In this document, I won’t go into the history or achievements of quality improvement in
manufacturing. Nor will I drill you on the technical aspects of those methods (which I
covered in some depth in my book Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way).
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 4
Instead, in this and the other whitepapers in this series I will:
Explain how current sales management methods do not fully address the most
significant problems in sales, and why current problem-solving methods don’t
work
Describe how process excellence applies in sales and marketing and why it is
worth applying
Show how you can begin to work within your organization to start applying
process excellence to your sales and marketing functions, taking advantage of
your company’s in-house process improvement expertise and experience
The alternative is to continue to manage sales and marketing as they are currently
managed in most business-to-business (B2B) sales environments, even in many otherwise
sophisticated, customer-focused organizations. As a sales or marketing manager, you owe
it to yourself, to your salespeople, to your organization, and to your customers to
seriously consider this approach to managing sales and marketing.
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 5
Beyond the Numbers Game
Despite developments such as “consultative selling” and “partnering with customers,”
salespeople in B2B environments still mainly work to set up sales calls, present products,
and move each potential deal from lead to prospect to customer. They build
relationships, cultivate internal champions, negotiate prices, and create a sense of
urgency, while management monitors the numbers of leads, prospects, and customers
these activities produce. As a result, salespeople and sales managers alike view sales as a
numbers game.
Do you manage sales as a numbers game (and is it working)?
Relying on these measurements, management’s focus becomes how to find more leads,
convert more leads into prospects, and persuade more prospects to become customers,
and salespeople work to meet these expectations. The primary goals are to hit your
targets, achieve your quotas, make your numbers. Sales is about numbers – forecasts,
quotas, budget and market share – but sales should not be managed as a numbers game.
You cannot manage sales focused solely on questions such as:
How many leads do we have?
How many prospects?
Where are they in the pipeline?
How many calls did we make?
How many deals will close in this period?
While these questions have their place, they have crowded out more useful questions
such as:
What value are customers now seeking from our products?
What do prospects want and need when making a purchase decision?
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 6
Which sales and marketing activities are working? Which ones aren’t?
What are the main organizational impediments to sales?
How can we make selling easier for salespeople?
I’m not saying numbers of leads, proposal opportunities, and deals aren’t important. I’m
saying these are merely another form of results measure. I’m saying improvement only
happens when you are able to identify the qualities of these leads, opportunities, and
deals that can make them more or less likely to buy from you. It happens when you – and
especially others in your company – use this information to change how things are done
so as to make selling easier for you, and buying easier for your prospects and customers.
This is perhaps the most important thing to realize about process excellence: It is based
on the fact that the company’s production system should be designed to produce
customers just as effectively as it produces products. The sales department should not
have to be the only – and lonely – advocate for what the customer needs. Every
customer-facing function in the business should be listening to the Voice of the
Customer, from product development, marketing , sales and service, through shipping
and billing departments.
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 7
Five Reasons to Consider Doing Things Differently
Here are five reasons to stop managing sales solely as a numbers game:
1. You’re measuring only results: Measuring the number of leads, prospects,
calls, and closed deals is fine, but they are gross measures. The numbers game
prompts the questions How-many? and Did-you-close? which tends to drive
increased activity with little thought to the value created by the activity.
2. You’re not measuring quality: The numbers game ignores the quality of leads,
prospects, and customers. (If you’re a sales manager you have at some time
surely received a huge folder of useless leads from a marketing campaign.) Not
even all customers are created equal. Don’t you want the best leads, prospects,
and customers?
3. You’re not measuring value: Your sales process can and should create value for
your prospects and customers, meaning they want more interaction with you. It
should do so at every stage of the Customer’s Journey, and this can, and should be
measured. If all you measure is sales results, that isn’t happening.
4. You can’t tell what is working and what isn’t: This is the biggest problem with
the numbers game. Until you realize a needed to systematically analyze what was
working and not working in the field, you can’t develop the methods for doing it.
As a result, you cannot improve the value your sales process creates because
you’re not detecting or measuring that value.
5. You can’t solve sales problems: Without data on what’s working and what isn’t,
you cannot discover the cause of sales problems or improve productivity. You
cannot even define sales problems accurately. This leaves you with only
experience and intuition—and the usual fixes—rather than data and problem-
solving tools.
If you’re managing sales focused on generating leads or making more cold calls, that’s
okay. It’s what most companies do, because they don’t recognize that there is a better
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 8
way. We’ve all seen numbers-driven sales managers who book revenue into the period
that makes sales look best. We’ve all seen managers discourage “stories” from
salespeople trying to explain where the customer is in the pipeline or why they didn’t
buy. We’ve seen managers insistently repeat, “Did you close?” to focus the salesperson
on getting the deal (and perhaps to humiliate him or her).
Your sales process can and should create value for your prospects and customers,
meaning they want more interaction with you. It should do so at every stage of the
Customer’s Journey, and this can, and should be measured. If all you measure is sales
results, that isn’t happening.
By focusing on the right numbers – the data that helps you identify the quality of your
sales process – you can change the game completely. You can learn to create value
through the selling process itself, making customers happy to work with your sales
people and use your products to solve their problems.
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 9
B2B Case Example
If you are like me, you might want to hear about a real B2B case you can relate to. Below
is such an example from one of our client engagements. If you do not primarily sell
software, I urge you to look beyond the industry to the nitty-gritty selling work that went
on. Although space limitations prevent us from providing all the details, the story
provides many things you can take away to improve your own B2B selling environment.
Background: Several years ago, I worked with a small B2B software company decided
to take a serious, “process oriented” approach to growing their business. First, they hired
a well-known sales training company to help them define a sales process. Theirs was a
complex sale requiring agreement between the VP of Finance, Information Systems, and
often other department heads in their customer as well. After finishing their sales process
they instituted 20 percent annual growth targets for the new account sales department,
and began investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay-per-click marketing to
generate leads on their web site with the goal of achieving that 20 percent growth.
Presenting Need: Unfortunately, new account revenue did not increase. It became clear
their investment in lead generation was not paying off. The president complained
salespeople would not follow the process they were given when he was not watching over
them. The sales manager was a sharp and aggressive fellow. He had been with the firm
since the beginning, and was good at closing deals. Yet (like the salespeople who worked
for him), he was challenged by the low quality of the sales opportunities.
Research: Unfortunately, the increased flow of leads from the website stressed the
team’s ability to respond properly to them. Since they had no way to determine which
were most likely to close, they tried to grind away at them all equally, calling back to
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 10
offer demos, software trials, and price quotes. Salespeople became frustrated when
prospects ignored their calls. Sales forecasts proved unreliable. Activity quotas were
introduced. People worked harder. However, new account sales results did not increase.
Root Cause Analysis: At this point, my firm, SPC, was hired to diagnose the situation.
After appropriate interviews and data gathering, we identified the root-cause of the
problem: The sales process had been designed primarily around pushing product, and was
disconnected from customer value. Customers naturally resisted salespeople’s attempts to
push them to do things they were not ready to do.
As a result, salespeople began to resist their training and the demands of the process and
the activity metrics imposed on them. The process provided no means of learning what
customers wanted, or of experimenting with alternative approaches. The numbers game
was producing a diminishing return, as it always does.
Countermeasure: We helped the sales team and the marketing department to gather
additional Voice of Customer data. This provided insight to observable characteristics of
prospects who were ready, as well as not ready to buy. The steps of the sales process
were redesigned around their Customer’s Journey.1 Instead of pushing prospects to do
things, salespeople could ask questions, and make enticing offers of information
appropriate to the customer’s situation. The offers were designed so prospects who
responded to them were more likely to be qualified than those who did not.
In addition, prospect qualification criteria were redefined in terms of observable
characteristics of the deals, rather than vague generalizations. For example, the
salesperson’s access to decision makers could be defined in observable ways, such as
1 Customer Journey – the stages the customer goes through from the time they do not realize they have a
problem or need to the time they are spending time and money with someone to solve that need.
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 11
“Don’t know who the decision maker is,” or “Never met the decision maker,” or “Met the
decision maker.” As a more detailed example of observable characteristics, consider the
question “To what extent do you understand the prospect’s decision making process?:”
Don’t know their decision making process
We only know part of their decision making process
The main contact is only one of the many people involved
A committee has been formed, and our contact has influence
Main contact is the decision maker/signing authority
Test Standard Work2: The salespeople were doing most of the work defining the new
sales process. Naturally, some salespeople began to try out the new qualification criteria
on active deals. They decided to fill out a form in their CRM to capture their observations
(where each observable characteristic carried a score from 1 to 5, with the higher score
corresponding to the likelihood of winning the business). Without doing more work, the
account scores prioritized their sales opportunities (those with the highest scores were
prioritized the highest). It also generated more insightful questions about what made
various prospects more or less likely to buy. Later, a statistical analysis of the data
collected via their qualification criteria suggested improvements to the qualification
criteria as well. Sales forecasts became more reliable.
The new process helped people buy, rather than pushing them when they weren’t ready.
Salespeople liked it because it told them which prospects would be easiest to close, and
what they needed to do to make the rest of their prospects just as easy to close.
2 Standard Work – a set of shared knowledge and respectful agreements about the best way of performing a
task or accomplishing a specified objective.
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 12
Deploy Standard Work: The flow of pay-per-click marketing leads returned to earlier
levels. The client asked us to redesign their sales training and software tools to support
the improved sales approach. The focus of sales meetings also changed. Marketers now
attended the sales meetings, and the focus shifted from sales activities alone to the quality
of the prospects and salespeople’s interactions with them (guided by the observable
qualification characteristics).
For example, salespeople complained about difficulties enticing a insurance company
prospect when their only case study was from a manufacturing company. In addition, if
the salesperson could not to elevate the quality of the prospect to the required level, they
were expected to “walk away” if the prospect was still not yet ready to buy (a difficult
thing to do when you are being measured only on activity).
Continually Improve: The flow of new account business began to turn up, and many
observations were made about how to continue to improve. For example, case studies
from insurance companies were developed and tested successfully with prospects in that
industry. Other industries were prioritized for developing additional case studies.
Additionally, a statistical analysis of the observable qualification scores revealed that
some of the questions were not as predictive as expected. The aforementioned criteria
around the customer’s decision making process as among these. After a lengthy
discussion, the question was changed as follows (compare the new criteria with the
original to see interesting differences):
To what extent do we understand the prospect’s decision making process?
They don't know their decision making process
They have one, but we don't know it
We have partial understanding, but they won’t share more
We have partial understanding, and they will share more
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 13
We fully understand their decision process
This improvement (among others made to the qualification criteria) were more predictive,
and even gave salespeople a “secret” early indication of potential success: would the
prospect fully share their decision making process with them? Sales management and
executive management became more interested in process improvements, because they
knew that money would follow.
Managers can become more alert to how they manage the sales process, realizing how
important it is to check salespeople’s methods and data to ensure learning takes place.
Results: With no additional marketing expense, and no change in the quality or quantity
of sales opportunities, the new account close ratio doubled, and deal size and margin
increased. Revenue from new accounts doubled. After two rounds of improvement in
qualification criteria, forecast accuracy exceeded 90 percent. The client applied the new
selling methods to existing accounts, which increased per user revenues and profitability
after the initial installation (with virtually no additional sales cost).
Most importantly, managers became more alert to how they managed the sales process,
realizing how important it is to check salespeople’s methods and data to ensure learning
took place. They also realized the value of sales meetings that produced a constant stream
of data around the high-impact, common causes for salespeople’s successes and
challenges.
Approximate Return on Investment: Consulting fees amounted to approximately
$200,000 over eight months. Increased profitability exceeded consulting fees in less than
12 months. Two-year return on investment (ROI) exceeded 600 percent.
Questions to Consider
Do your salespeople have their own ways of doing things? Why would they want
to follow a consistent process?
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 14
To what extent do your salespeople push customers, vs offering constructive help
in solving their problems? Why is this the case?
How clear is the language your salespeople use to compare and contrast their
sales opportunities? Do their terms/words mean the same thing to each of them?
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 15
Next Steps to Consider
If you would like more information about bringing Lean process excellence to sales, we
have a Website devoted to it (www.salesperformance.com) where you will find several
years' worth of articles, case examples, and blog postings. In addition, you might:
If you would like to ask a question about this topic, visit the “Your Most
Important Question” page on our website.
If you think your lean or process excellence department could offer you some
assistance, consider recommending the introduction we have developed
specifically for them: How Sales Process Excellence Can Grow Your Company’s
Revenues and Margins.”
If you are convinced that applying lean to sales and marketing makes sense, you
may want to suggest that your General Manager or President read our introduction
specifically written for them: “How to Grow Your Business Through Sales
Process Excellence, a Guide for Chief Executives and Business Unit Leaders.”
Contact SPC to see how we can help your team with this important objective.
Please include:
- Your sales organization’s size, market geography and industry
- Specific UDRs and challenges you are facing
- What attempts you have made to overcome those challenges
- What you would like SPC to do for you
Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. • 877-784-6507 • [email protected]
345 Banyon Brook Pt, Roswell GA, 30076 • www.salesperformance.com
Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster, And Win
More of the Right Customers Through Sales Process Excellence
Copyright © 2012 Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 16
About Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.
Founded in 2002, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. helps the sales organizations of
B2B companies improve their processes for finding, winning and keeping customers.
SPC’s proprietary methods address the challenges of selling in global markets, managing
dispersed sales teams and working effectively with channel partners and in complex
distribution systems.
SPC has helped divisions of Pentair, Tyco, DuPont, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and dozens
of other companies make their sales funnel flow faster by enabling them to identify and
deliver more customer value, while reducing bottlenecks, waste, cost of sales, and time to
market.
About Michael J. Webb
In 2002, after a lengthy career in field sales, sales management and sales training,
Michael Webb founded Sales Performance Consultants to create a data-driven alternative
to the slogans and shallow impact offered by typical sales training, sales consulting and
CRM companies. Michael helped organize the first conferences on applying Six Sigma to
marketing and sales, and is the author of “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way”
(Kaplan, 2006, 4.5 stars on Amazon) and numerous articles on how B2B sales
organizations can benefit from Lean and process improvement techniques.
He holds professional certifications in production and inventory management, quality
management, and has a BS in Mathematics from Southeast Missouri State University.