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By
Paul Deis, CEO, PROACTION
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Article Summary: Does your company have “too
much success” in the marketing and selling area? No?
Really? We thought so. Well, you are not alone –
this is one of the least understood, least worked
on, most universal performance improvement
opportunities, applicable to almost every firm. The
message here is that Best Practice marketing and
sales is a defined, understood, improve-able
process, with its own performance metrics, business
processes, systems, and continuous improvement
program. Key topics in the article include:
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Symptoms identify great opportunities
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Widespread – lack of a defined process
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What
to do, where to start.
Symptoms Identify Great Opportunities
In the marketing and sales area, it is rare to find
a company with a well defined, well understood
marketing and sales process, even though sales is
the “life-blood” of any company. It is this lack, we
believe, more than any other single factor, that
kills off otherwise good companies, with great
products or service offerings. Symptoms that one
typically finds:
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Marketing, a separate world – often
marketing is a separate organization from
sales – it buys media time, advertising,
creates art work, logos, ads, brochures,
does direct mail campaigns, or other
“bush-beating” activities. But often there
is little or no coordination, even
communication with the sales organization.
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Star-based sales – in many companies
there is a small, often VERY small team of
“hot-shot” sales people (“stars”) who bring
the bulk of the business in the door. When
one of these people leaves the company,
often taking key customers with him/her, the
company suffers a huge drop in sales. One
company in our experience literally went
bankrupt after its top sales rep left for a
competitor and took the “A” customers with
him. No joke.
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Coaching oriented – selling is seen
as a motivational challenge, one wrapped up
with personal egos, fears of rejection and
the like. Sales improvement therefore
involves personality attributes like
confidence, charisma, speaking skills, and
others. Coaching does have a role, of
course, even in a well-defined sales
process.
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No improvement over time – since
marketing and sales are not structured,
clearly defined processes, with inputs,
steps and outputs that can be studied and
improved, the company has good years, and
not-so-good years. No one knows what else to
do. |
As a side note, we should comment here that the
primary focus of these remarks is business to
business marketing and sales. Consumer products, at
least at the retail level, are typically more driven
by effective (or ineffective) marketing –
advertising especially. However, even with these
products, the preceding steps from producer of the
product to the retail shelf will frequently involve
a considerable amount of “business-to-business”
strategy, marketing and sales activity.
Widespread – lack of a defined process
What do we mean by a “defined process?” A
process is a series of actions or functions
between inputs and outputs that brings about a
result. The elements of the process are therefore
capable of being measured. If they can be measured,
then they can in turn be controlled.
Anything that can be controlled, and therefore
changed, and if it is changeable, it can be improved
by comparing the effects of the changes on the
results (outputs) with measurements.
In the absence of processes, there is, even under
the best intentioned circumstances, a powerful
element of randomness. If it is random, then the
results cannot be reliably predicted over time.
In the sales and marketing arena, there are three
distinct overall processes:
Each of these is in a sense, nested within
the others – sales within marketing, marketing
within strategy. There is, then, a strong
interdependence relationship between these three
processes. The interdependence is there whether we
like it or not, that’s not the question.
The question is, is the interdependence being
intelligently and effectively managed? Further, it
is a simple fact that in addition to these
interrelationships, there are others with the rest
of the company. Are these being
intelligently managed, as interrelated,
interdependent processes, with appropriate
measurements, communication streams, information
management, and improvement efforts?
What about the effect on the 4 Essential Factors of
the Best Practice Path of a non-process oriented
approach to handling both overall business strategy
and specifically marketing/sales strategy, marketing
and the activity of selling? Let’s touch on these
briefly:
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Effective Systems & Processes
– to the extent that these three
critical-success-factor areas are not
managed via defined, improvable processes,
this vital factor will be seriously
constrained, even if efforts elsewhere in
the company are top-notch.
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2. |
Continuous Improvement Process
– by definition, if it isn’t a defined
process, with measurements, controls and
changes over time, it is not amenable to
organized improvements. There will
therefore be a strong element of luck
in how things go with a company in this
situation. Or “star” performers.
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3. |
Education and training
– there may be education and training, but
where will it go, absent a structured
process to apply it to? If it’s personal
growth-style, with confidence development
workshops and the like, there may be some
improvement, but only as long as the
individuals who took the workshop retain the
material and stay with the company in that
position. The best use of education and
training is to apply it to the process
improvement effort itself, so that
improvements are permanent.
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4. |
Effective Leadership and Culture
– absent a structured process, leadership
may have a very positive effect, but it
is only temporary, as its effect is almost
exclusively on the individuals themselves,
not on the process or system that produces
the results. It is important here to
distinguish between the vitally important
individual motivation, or better still
inspiration that results from effective
leadership and organization culture, and
much longer-term results of having that
effective leadership and culture applied to
continuously improved, integrated marketing
and sales processes. |
Leading best practice companies have been working on
their strategy, marketing and sales processes for
decades; this is why, in part, they are consistently
successful over such long time periods. Naturally,
excellence in other areas is vital, but these, such
as engineering and production are dependent on
successful marketing and sales processes.
Some few companies with average-level products or
services, but superior, high-performing marketing
and sales processes experience sustained success for
many years, with the only distinguishing
characteristic being their highly effective
marketing and sales process.
What to do, where to start
The good news in most companies is that their mere
survival indicates that they are doing enough “good”
things to at least stay afloat. Those of us who
have been focused on business performance
improvements are often the most enthused when we
find un-worked improvement opportunities, as it is
far easier to improve something that is already
working, however poorly, than it is to start
something from scratch.
And, if intelligently worked out changes are made,
there is a very good chance that performance will
improve substantially, simply because you have
brought order into a previously random or even
chaotic area.
By contrast, if you tinker in a major way with an
already well-defined, very successful process, the
odds of scoring a “home-run” are not as high – you
may even do some damage. So, improvements
opportunities are great news in most cases.
To provide a guide for you to place your company in
perspective, we provide a series of questions that
you can ask yourself, a checklist, to determine
where your company is, and where the best place to
start might be. This list, by the way, is by no
means exhaustive or all-inclusive to all types of
companies or industries.
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Strategy
– McKinsey, in a recent global survey,
concluded that most companies are not
satisfied with their strategy planning
process. If the overall strategy process is
weak, then the market/sales strategy process
will, of necessity, be weaker still in most
cases. What is the strategy process your
company uses – both overall, but
specifically, the marketing and sales area?
Is there a start-middle-end set of steps
that are used repeatedly, the result of
which is a set of actions? And, over time
are these actions measured, then
“re-processed” in the next strategy cycle in
a systematic way so improvements in the
strategy process can be made?
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Marketing – is it an “island?” Are managers in marketing measured by
criteria such as how many ads are placed,
direct mail pieces sent out, or other
non-sales oriented factors?
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Does the marketing function work closely,
via defined steps on a regular, consistent
basis with sales and other functions? Are
promotions made for which products are not
yet available? Are selling activities and
resources adjusted and coordinated with
promotion campaigns and with production
schedules? Are marketing performance
measurements tied to sales volume successes
and targets or better still, profitability
and market share penetration? Or are these
kinds of measurements absent?
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Sales – can you (or someone working in sales, at least) articulate the
specific steps, the sequence in a
structured, systematic sales process? Does
the process start with tracking some type of
initial contact or expression of interest
and work step-by-step through the whole
process to actual sales? Is there a sales
“system” that is used? Are there
measurements at each step in the process to
enable sales managers to understand how to
improve the process? Is it improved over
time?
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Sales Forecasting – it is an axiom among sales managers that more managers
are fired for poor sales forecasting than
for inability to generate actual sales.
What is the sales forecasting process at
your company? Is its accuracy measured?
Publicized? Has the forecast accuracy
improved over time? Is it accurate overall,
but terrible at the detail level? If so,
what could be done to improve this? Do
people make jokes in bad taste about the
forecast?
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Is there an effective sales and operation
planning process in use? How is the sale
forecasting process adjusted to accommodate
new product or service offerings,
promotions, close-outs, soon-to-be-obsolete
products and other non-linear factors? Is
there an effective product-life-cycle
management process in use?
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Mixed product and service business
– increasingly companies have realized that
integrating the two activities brings
sizeable benefits – to customers, and
especially the marketing and sales
activity. Is there a service component to
your company’s products?
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Is service even marketed at all? Or, is it treated as an
after-thought, with the “real money” being
in the product sale? Companies that have
worked long and hard to develop
well-integrated combined product and service
offerings have frequently come to dominate
their market, as customers come to depend on
them, and are willing to pay consistently
for the service that follows the product.
Is there a defined process by which services
are linked to products or other integration
opportunities. Is the “service or field
support” manager a low-ranking person at the
company? Or is he/she a real executive,
with P&L accountability? |
In conclusion, we have just scratched the surface
here, as you may surmise. The thread through all of
these questions is, once again, not whether you have
“something going on” in the area. Rather, is it
systematic, carried out by means of a clearly
defined, consistently followed set of steps – a
process that is itself independent of specific
people and personalities.
And better still, is it consistently improved in its
performance over time, so the results of that these
processes themselves improve over time? If your
company is like many, the good news is that there is
a LOT of opportunity to improve performance,
stability of the company, security of everyone’s
jobs, happier investors (higher profitability),
larger market share, and a host of other benefits
that all result from integrated marketing and sales
process management.
We welcome your feedback and comments. Send us your
questions and we’ll answer them in a future
Newsletter. Please type in the address.
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Paul
Deis
