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Michael Lodato has
written a couple of interesting articles for BPTrends on
sales process management. Now, he has published a book that
provides sales managers with an integrated methodology for
improving how your sales organization works.
Reviewed by Paul Harmon
An Excerpt
As late as 1990, business process work was
almost entirely focused on production, manufacturing and
back office paper processing activities. In the past decade
and a half, however, there has been a steady shift toward
processes that lie outside of the manufacturing domain. This
shift has been driven, in large part by the overall
transformation of US companies into service domains. As a
broad generalization, business process work has extended
from manufacturing and bookkeeping to paper processing, and
then to supply chains and new product development. The areas
where one has heard least about process improvement are in
marketing and sales.
Put a little differently, there are lots of
process books that talk about the use of business process
methods in production environments, lots of books on back
office automation, and, recently, on supply chain
improvement. There have been few books on analyzing and
improving sales or marketing processes. Thus, Dr. Michael
Lodato’s new book, Integrated Sales Process Management,
is especially welcome.
The essence of process is systems. If we
think of a business as a system, we expect inputs,
transformations and outputs. If the system is complex, we
expect that transformations will occur in a series of steps
or activities, and we assume that we can manage the process
more effectively if we understand the process and have
measures to let us know how well each activity is being
accomplished.
Given the variety of ways organizations sell,
this could be a book focused on automated selling via a
website, it could focus primarily on the use of software to
automate sales processes, or it could focus on either the
management of sales and marketing processes or on the actual
activities that salespeople undertake. Lodato focuses
primarily on the processes by which managers manage sales
and marketing activities. Thus, he focuses on planning and
setting goals and on monitoring activities and controlling
the results. As Lodato suggests “There is pressure to adopt
sales automation, but there isn’t much evidence of its
improving sales effectiveness. If you want to improve our
competitiveness you may need to change the behavior of your
salespeople by focusing on the processes that run the
business. You can’t change the behavior without changing the
processes and expecting that they are being followed.”
In other words, Lodato has written a book
designed to help sales managers build an integrated system
of sales and marketing management processes. He has a
chapter on selling, but it’s a small part of the book and
it’s the least process oriented. Lodato’s real focus is on
the managerial processes that structure and control the
sales activities.
A quick glance at the table of contents of
Integrated Sales Process Management will confirm its
focus.
1. Sales Management Overview
2. The Product Marketing Management Process
3. The MASTER Method of Personal Selling
4. Sales and Marketing Planning
5. Introduction to Integrated Sales Process
Management
6. Sales Cycle Management
7. Managing
Sales Opportunities
8. Sales
Process Management
9. Sales
Forecasting
10. Territory
Management
11. Account
Management
12.
Integrated Channel Management
13.
Management of Salespeople
14.
Increasing Salesperson Performance
I’ve done a
lot of work in the area of sales – mostly working with bank
sales processes – so I read this book with quite a bit of
interest. Wearing my process analyst hat, I was a little
disappointed. Lodato isn’t as systematic as I’d have
preferred and doesn’t integrate things in the way I would
have liked. As a simple example, I wish he’d have used verbs
to describe his processes, to force himself and his readers
to think more about the activity they were trying to
accomplish and less about the functional area that the
process could so easily be confused with.
On the other
hand, compared with a typical sales book that relies heavily
on exhortation, Lodato is definitely a systems thinker. He
recommends process, and talks about how you could apply
process techniques in different specific areas of sales. His
methodology, if he can be said to offer one, is to analyze
sales and marketing management activities using process
techniques. More important, he brings together a huge amount
of valuable information that any manager responsible for a
sales organization is going to need to consider as he or she
develops sales processes. Anyone who is interested in field
sales or marketing processes and is considering how to
define and measure them within a large organization would
profit from Lodato’s detailed discussion of the management
processes required to run a quality field sales or marketing
operation.
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Paul
Harmon
is the Executive Editor of Business Process
Trends (www.bptrends.com). He is a recognized BPM
analyst and the author of Business Process Change.
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