Helping sales and marketing teams make their numbers may well be the biggest challenge of all for Senior Executives.

But how can you really know the actual cause of a problem in sales and marketing? In fact, how do you even define the actual problem? (Hint: slow sales is a symptom, not a problem. To solve the problem, you need to know if it is in the market, the sales process, or in the product.)

 

If you don't understand the problem and its cause, how can you solve it? Do you just give something a shot? Do you try a new marketing campaign, CRM system, or sales training program? Do you hold a sales contest or adjust the compensation plan? Do you change out the sales VP, change salespeople's territories, or the salespeople themselves? Or, do you bank on new products or services - or a miracle?

 

With the top and bottom lines at stake, you need hard ROI data to justify sales and marketing decisions. The right data and information position you to understand what undermines sales and marketing efforts and drives feast-or-famine cycles. That's in stark contrast to just giving something a shot.

• A new marketing campaign may produce leads, but will the leads be worth what you'll spend to get them - and will your salespeople think they're worth anything?
• A CRM system may tell you a lot about how much you are selling to which accounts, but very little about why they buy - let alone why they don't
• Even if you're not happy with your sales manager, he or she may be a victim, rather than the cause, of problems
• Sales contests, changes to comp plans, and restructuring territories all have their place, as long as they not just change for the sake of change

Without the right data and information all you can do is try various ways of goosing sales, and hope something works. The fact is that most companies operate pretty much along those lines. But not all companies do. Some companies use proven methods for solving sales problems.

 

If you are at all familiar with Lean Six Sigma or TQM (Total Quality Management), you have an idea of what process improvement can mean to a business. You may even have wondered how it might be applied to sales and marketing. Although you might call it by another name, the fact is you can apply process improvement to sales and marketing - with extremely successful results.

My name is Michael Webb, and I'm President of Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. My team and I have developed effective ways of measuring and improving sales processes. We have implemented them with hundreds of companies in dozens of industries in North America. I wrote the acclaimed "Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way" (Kaplan Publishing, 2006), and delivered the keynote addresses to the first two national conferences ever held on applying Six Sigma to marketing and sales.

My team and I offer you this website (and SPIF! - the only newsletter devoted to Sales Process Improvement) to help you learn how to define and improve your company's sales process the right way.

We'll show you improvements your teams can make (some simple and small, others more significant) to dramatically increase revenue and reduce sales cost. Here are just a few of the things our subscribers have learned in past issues (and which you'll find on this website):

• How to obtain hard data to evaluate ROI in sales and marketing
  • A recent article, "Why Your Sales Process Cost Matters, and What You Need to Know to Get it Right, profiled a simple method one of our clients uses to measure financial returns on marketing and selling activities. Another path breaking article shows how you can measure the quality and quantity of leads, opportunities, and deals flowing through your pipeline.
• How to get salespeople and distributors to spend more time on the right prospects, and less time on the wrong ones
  • A machinery manufacturer in the Midwest learned such a technique and saw a lift in their close ratio almost immediately. (The approach they applied is described in the article, " Generating Support for a Sales Quality Initiative".)
• How to help salespeople earn more time with decision-makers
  • Your salespeople can learn how to locate hidden value in their prospects' businesses. You'll read about dozens of companies that have used such approaches to transform their sales cultures, outclass their competitors, and exceed their market share goals. (See the article on " Business Value Mapping".)
• How to generate a tidal wave of qualified opportunities
  • A tweak to their marketing methods enabled one of the companies you'll read about to multiply their revenues by twenty. (Check out the "Unconventional B2B Marketing" article in the case studies.)

These companies, and many more we have not written about, have achieved millions of dollars of revenue and profit improvements.

 

You'll find the storiesand learn the secretsof these companies and more in these pages and in your weekly SPIF!.

You won't find pixie dust or magic bullets, just a more fact-based approach to managing and leading your sales and marketing team. This requires some effort and discipline, but it works. It takes time to change long-standing habits and to form new, more productive ones. The manufacturing plants that used process improvement to achieve permanently higher quality at lower costs didn't do it overnight either. But sales process improvement works, and it starts working almost immediately.

Sign up below for our thought-leading newsletter SPIF! and we'll keep you ahead of the rapid developments in this emerging field. By telling us the things we ask in the signup below, you can be sure we'll provide only the information that's important to you. In addition, when you subscribe you'll also receive the eight page white paper:

"Bring Process Discipline to Your Sales Organization
Without Driving Away Your Salespeople or Your Customers!"

It's all still FREE, (it may not be forever) so don't wait!