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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.
Integrated Sales Process Management:
A Methodology for improving sales
effectiveness in the 21st Century
By: Michael W. Lodato Ph.D.
Authorhouse, 2006
Reviewed by Eddie Gloyne
I can speak from experience about the value
that Michael Lodato’s new book can be to sales and marketing
executives facing challenges of doing business today. I met
him when I became Sales Vice President of 3D Systems, a
provider of very sophisticated products to the manufacturing
industry. For about 18 months the company had experienced a
very significant slowdown in the rate of sales. Our new
CEO, Art Sims, knew of Lodato’s 20 years of experience in
developing and applying structured business processes to
solve such problems and invited him to help us. After a
brief study, we all agreed that we needed to restructure and
re-engineer the entire sales process.
We concluded that the effectiveness of our
sales organization could be permanently improved when
selling was defined as a set of processes and that the
processes, once defined, could be managed, measured and
improved. We weren’t looking for a band-aid. I remember
Lodato telling us that “the winners in the increasingly
competitive business environment of the future will
differentiate themselves - not only in what they
offer, but how they offer it. The sales process will
become a competitive advantage.” And it certainly did
for us.
Not only did the effectiveness of our sales
force improve significantly, but we also saw similar results
from our sales channel partners after we installed the
processes at each of their companies. This would not have
been as successful as we would have liked if Lodato’s
integrated processes had not been as concise, portable,
practical, and tailorable to the organization and culture
of each of our manufacturing representative partners. Where
the existing culture was loose, the processes needed to be
more informal. That need was anticipated in Lodato’s
methodology. We were able to
seamlessly integrate our sales and marketing management
processes with processes to manage our channel partners. We
used the same approach for both. We provided each of
them with their own sales management manuals and training,
and would strongly recommend that purchasers of the
Integrated Sales Process Management (ISPM) book provide
copies to its channel partners as a tool for increasing
their sales effectiveness. They will get the most benefit
from this if they provide training as we did.
We found that
ISPM brings a high level of control to the sales and
marketing effort - more control than was previously
imagined. The confidence gained by the executive team in the
short and long term sales forecasting and results was
fundamental in ramping the growth of the company from a
stagnant position to a 300% growth in revenues within 4
years.
The ISPM book is actually more
comprehensive than what we received from the author
personally. It covers management as a process, personal
selling, product marketing management process, sales and
marketing planning, sales management, channel management,
and people management. I find the material easy to read and
understand. Great care has been taken to explain the basic
concepts in a step-by-step pragmatic “here’s how to do it”
fashion. The book presents a new model for managing sales
that speaks to the needs of everyone in the sales
organization – from executives to managers to salespeople to
sales support people. It links theory to practical
application.
The processes in the book are so well
articulated, a software developer would find it an excellent
model for the development of a sales process automation
(SPA) system.
Since the author believes as I do that
coaching is the raison d’etre of a sales manager, he
has taken great care to provide coaching guidelines so
managers can help salespeople be the best they can be.
In the mid 1990s, a case study was published
by the Anderson School of Management at UCLA describing the
application of the ISPM methodology at 3D Systems,
Inc. The study reported significant increases in revenues
and attributed the gains to the adoption by 3D Systems of
the “structured sales process” designed by the author.
A final
point may be the most important. That is that the author
stresses the importance of managing the interactions among
the various management processes. And so, throughout the
book, he uses the terms Integrated Sales Management
(ISM), Integrated Territory Management (ITM) and
Integrated Channel Management (ICM)
and recommends their implementation to
seamlessly integrate the product marketing strategy, the
sales and marketing tactics, and the sales and marketing
management processes.
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Eddie Gloyne is Sales Vice President
(Ret.) of 3D Systems Incorporated. |
