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Integrated Sales Process Management –
Featured Best Practices
Here we feature specific information about an
area that, for most businesses, can be substantially
improved through Best Practice process management methods –
Integrated Sales Process Management. As we discuss further
below, this area is almost never handled as a business
process, to its detriment, and is therefore not capable of
systematic performance improvement.
Michael Lodato, a PROACTION Associate, is an
articulate, clear writer in the challenging area of how to
best manage the processes that determine how a
company’s marketing and sales activities will perform.
His qualifications to write in depth in this
area are considerable, including:
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Successful selling of
“difficult to sell” products and services
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Managing teams of sales
professionals
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Managing marketing and
sales organizations
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Teaching – a California
Lutheran University, in Thousand Oaks, CA.
Now available through the
PROACTION
Best Practices Publication Store are Michael’s books and booklets that
provide in-depth insight and detailed understanding into how
to construct, improve and manage all aspects of the
marketing and sales activity. These include:
Books – available only
in hard copy form:
Booklets – these are
shorter, 15-50 pages, focused on a particular topic, and are
available in both downloadable (PDF) form and hard copy:
White Papers – also now
available on the
PROACTION Free White Papers page are
Michael’s articles and papers, including:
Impact of a Lack of Process
Management in the Marketing and Sales Activity
The notion of process
management, is not new, of course, and is well developed in
many other areas of business, such as production and supply
chain management.
In our experience with nearly
60 companies, we almost always find that the “front-end” of
the company – the way in which it puts itself out into the
market place, are disjointed and seldom even thought of as
an area where process management has a place.
Symptoms we have consistently
found:
·
Marketing not integrated
– advertising and public relations have their own managers,
methods, goals and ways of being measured, separate from
sales. Results include expensive promotion campaigns that
are not coordinated with field sales people, for example.
·
Sales are "star"
based – a small group of very talented individuals
frequently secure most of the sales volume, with a larger,
less effective group “tagging along” in their wake. How and
why the “stars” are successful usually remains very much a
set of personal capabilities, not the result of a
consciously managed set of processes.
·
Coaching Only –
sales management is seen as a coaching-like activity, not a
specific, thought-out, step-by-step process. It ends up
being focused on personality attributes like confidence
instead of a process. This is not to say that coaching does
not have a place – it does – but it should be in addition
to, not instead of, a rational process.
·
Inability to improve
– since sales management is not a worked-out series of steps
– i.e., a process, it is incapable of being improved. So,
the company has good years, and bad years, depending on the
“stars” it has on its selling team.
It is the last of these that
makes the case for a business process orientation to how a
company’s marketing and sales activities are managed – so
that their performance can be consistently, repeatedly
improved over time – the most important test of whether a
method is a Best Practice or not.
With Michael Lodato’s insightful, effective methods to this
challenging area, a company has a very good shot at
achieving true Best Practice level performance in this vital
area. |
