Have questions? We have the answers?

Your investment in the Solution Design Workshop depends on the size of your organization. The fee covers the two-day workshop, a comprehensive outcomes document and a formal presentation-of-findings meeting. It excludes travel and living expenses.

Click here to request a detailed Solution Design Workshop Overview document including pricing options.

Our terms require payment in full, at time of booking.

If  you are prepared to commit to our Managed SPE Fast Track option prior to the Solution Design Workshop we will roll your Solution Design Workshop into month one of the MSPE engagement fee (meaning the workshop is free).

Furthermore, we will give you the ability to opt-out (with no penalty) at the end of month one, if you decide, post-workshop, that you’d like to go-it-alone.

For many organizations, this is an appealing option because it benefits the company either way.

If you proceed with Managed SPE, you save the cost of a standalone workshop and a bunch of time; and, if you don’t, you get the Solution Design Workshop as part of the first month’s fee for Managed SPE.

Although the format of the workshop is flexible (and it needs to be!), we work through the following basic process:

1. Develop an understanding of your current reality. Including what’s working — and what’s not — with respect to your sales process and other associated processes
2. Build a conceptual model of the desired future reality
3. Define the practical attributes of this future reality (resourcing, process design, technology, measurements, promotional activities, etc)
4. Design the process required to transition your organization from its current to its future reality (a high-level project outline)
5. Produce an outcomes document (containing a summary of the conclusions we reached, along with all diagrams)
6. Present findings to your management team in a formal workshop

Considerations

In the deliberations above, we consider the following:

1. Organizational strategy (competitive advantage and all that)
2. Opportunity origination (how you generate sales opportunities)
3. Opportunity-management (how you convert opportunities into sales)
4. Customer service (processing transactions, generating quotes, handling customer issues and so on)
5. The integration of the processes above with operations
6. Human resource requirements (salespeople and support personnel)
7. Process management and metrics (how do you synchronize activities within — and between — processes?)
8. Technology (CRM, management information, digital marketing, etc)
9. Communication requirements (information packages, websites, email, webinars, etc)
10. Change-management issues

The Solution Design Workshop will be facilitated by Justin Roff-Marsh. Justin is the founder and President of Ballistix.

He is responsible for the development of Sales Process Engineering (Ballistix’s approach to design and management of the sales process. He is also an expert in the Theory of Constraints (a qualified Jonah). He’s the author of Reengineering the Sales Process and The Machine.

Justin presents SPE to thousands of executives at conferences each year and spends most of his remaining time consulting on its implementation.

Justin has led consulting engagements in North America, Australasia, South America and Europe, with organizations ranging in size from GE Energy, Lamar, Arca and Midwesco, through countless small to medium enterprises.

The Solution Design Workshop will be facilitated by Justin Roff-Marsh.  Often he will be accompanied by our Director of Engagements.

Where the team participating in the workshop is concerned, we recommend:

1. The team be no larger than 10 people
2. It contains all of your C-level executives
3. It includes the directors of sales, marketing and customer service
4. If the firm has advisors with an interest in sales and operations, they should be present

While we prepare the Solution Design Workshop in the expectation that you will engage with us, there is no commitment required on your behalf do so. Furthermore, we are careful to prepare this Solution Design Workshop so that it has true stand-alone value.

While we would not encourage you to implement the findings of this Solution Design Workshop without the benefit of our experience, this is nonetheless technically possible.

We drive growth by ensuring that our clients’ salespeople have significantly more selling conversations than their competitors’ salespeople do. In practice, this means restructuring organizations so that any activity that isn’t a selling conversation is removed from salespeople and allocated elsewhere.

We also tend to move most selling conversations inside—where salespeople are significantly more productive. Turns out that customers want to communicate online and by phone to the maximum possible extent. Even where major deals are concerned, video conferences are almost always a better alternative than face-to-face visits. (Of course, a critical few activities do still need to occur in the field: and that’s fine.)

Our approach works.

We have example after example of (mostly industrial) organizations that have transitioned from no growth to >20% year-on-year growth rates. And we have several well-documented examples of organizations that have doubled revenues within a two-to-three-year period.

We’ve been applying SPE to scores of companies in as many industries for more than 20 years. The principles that underpin SPE are proven and shown to work time and time again.

Please check out our results section or vist our blog to learn more.

Typically, the implementation of Sales Process Engineering (SPE) results in the following benefits:

A significant reduction in the size of the sales team (with a shift in focus towards inside sales)

The conversion of most existing (technical) salespeople into project leaders (responsible for managing the interface between sales and fulfillment)

A ten-times increase in the number of business-development appointments performed by the remaining salespeople

A dramatic improvement in customer service (>90% Ontime Case Completion)

A reduction in sales cycle-time

A reduction (or elimination) in the need for regional offices

A leaner management structure

Minimal capital expenditure

Minimal increase in operating expenses

Yes you can use as much or as little of our total service as you wish.  We have found most organizations with existing marketing departments or agency relationships still use our creative team for pre-approach and lead-generation activities as this is an area of particular expertise. You can a sample of campaigns generated by the Ballistix creative team on our creative work portfolio page.

We operate all across the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. We do work in other countries from time-to-time. Contact us to see if we will work in yours.

The only thing not covered in our flat monthly fee are those typical out-of-pocket expenses incurred in everyday sales and marketing activities. These include things like out-of-pocket creative costs (photography, printing and similar), recruiting expenses (listings on job boards), list compilation and purchasing costs, expenses relating to outsourced labor, and consultants’ onsite travel and accommodation.

Managed SPE gives you access to an experienced Program Manager supported by the entire Ballistix team.

The fee is inclusive of ancillary services such as technology, creative, strategy, etc and includes things like CRM hosting (V-tiger), website hosting, webinar management, visualization dashboards (Nsyteful) and other ancillary sales-related reporting and technology.

A Ballistix client can (and should) ensure that it makes full use of these ancillary services. This will maximize the value delivered by Managed SPE and help to justify an enduring engagement.

No!  Our agreement is written in plain English with no nasty surprises. You can cancel anytime.

If yours is a mid-sized (or larger) business, it’s likely that the net cost of Managed SPE (from month one onwards) will be minimal!

There are two basic reasons why:

1. Even though we’ll be building you a (much) more productive sales function, it’s possible that your sales-related expenses will go down as we often find the newly re-engineered sales environment requires fewer field salespeople, fewer regional offices and a leaner management structure.
2. Because of the comprehensive range of services we provide, it’s very likely that our Managed SPE service will displace a number of existing providers such as CRM vendors, design agencies, recruiters and marketing consultants.

We have worked with organizations of all sizes (from the very small to top 100 companies) across all type of industries.  Some of the characteristics of typical organizations we work with include:

1. A complex, consultative or high-ticket sales environment (made-to-order manufacturing, project sales, B2B sales etc).
2. A sales team (or the need to sell)
3. A customer service team (or need for one)
4. A delivery team

Visit our results page for a representative sample of clients we have worked with.

The most common objection against not paying salespeople commission is that, without commission, salespeople won’t be motivated.

In our experience hiring and building sales teams, it’s not clear that variable pay (commission) results in a consistent improvement in motivation in most industries. And to the extent it does, the more obvious emergent behaviors seem to be the negative ones.

Is this level of super-motivation sustainable? Is it scalable? Are your commissioned people really more motivated, more talented and more capable than your salaried ones? And, are you sure it doesn’t generate undesirable effects? 

Here’s an alternative.

Hire smart people with good communication skills. Pay them a little more than their market value. Provide them with a compelling proposition and train them to articulate it effectively. And then, put them in an environment where they have plenty of prospects to talk to and nothing to distract them from selling conversations.

When I argue that salespeople should be paid salaries—not commissions—executives will often counter that commissions reduce financial risk.

My counter proposition is that it’s best to pay market value and then make performance mandatory, rather than optional.

It’s true that, on a month-to-month basis, you pay underperforming salespeople less than you would if you were paying them salary. But, do you really think this saving is enough to offset the new business those underperformers are not winning?

I know what you’re thinking. We fire underperformers and replace them with better salespeople.

Well here’s the problem. If you have commissioned salespeople, they operate with a high degree of autonomy. That means you have limited information you can use to evaluate their performance.

They’ll report a larger and larger pipeline with each passing month but, in my experience, it takes at least 12 months before it’s clear that a salesperson is an underperformer.

If you put salespeople on salary and manage them properly, you’ll pay out more on a month-to-month basis. But you’ll recognize underperformers within 90 days and turn them over.

When your salespeople tell you they win business because of THEIR relationships, you better hope they are NOT telling the truth.

In most industrial organizations, most revenue doesn’t come directly from salespeople, it comes from existing customers repurchasing. Customers don’t keep buying from you because they like your salespeople, they keep buying because they like your product, your pricing, and your delivery performance.

It is likely that your salespeople develop personal relationships with your organization’s customers but these relationships are the CONSEQUENCE of commercial relationships, NOT the cause of them.

Now, here is an exception to this rule. If your organization is operationally dysfunctional, it’s possible that your salespeople wrap the organization’s output in a bundle of personal services—to protect customers from this dysfunction.

If this is the case, your customers ARE transacting with you because of their personal relationships with your salespeople. But that’s not a good thing. It’s a sign that you should identify and fix your operational dysfunction before your customers discover what’s really going on behind the curtain!

Conventional wisdom says that the sales department should be responsible for revenue. But conventional wisdom is wrong!

In a typical business, most revenue doesn’t come directly from salespeople—it comes from existing customers repurchasing. Now, if you alert salespeople to this, they won’t be surprised. They’ll agree and explain that’s why they devote so much effort to account management.

Clearly, salespeople’s perspective is that they are responsible for the retention of accounts. But there’s a problem with this perspective.

Turns out that, in almost every B2B business, if you catalog the reasons why customers defect and take their business to a competitor, the cause of defection is never the salesperson. Customers leave—in almost every case—because of factors for which operations is directly responsible. They leave because of poor delivery performance or because they are not happy with pricing, or the product.

So salespeople should not be responsible f0r revenue because they don’t directly influence it. Operations should be. Because they do! And salespeople should focus exclusively for the pursuit of new business.

In most businesses, this is not even vaguely correct! Monthly revenue receipts are actually a better indicator of the performance of Operations (customer service and delivery teams) than they are of Sales.

Here’s why. Revenue comes from transactions. But where do transactions come from? Well, most transactions emerge from commercial relationships—not directly from the efforts of salespeople.

Salespeople are responsible for winning commercial relationships (accounts as we call them). But, once an account is established, most transactions are programmatic. Salespeople are not—and should not be—involved with them.

So, if you want to measure the contribution of sales, you need to calculate the net-present-value of accounts won during this reporting period, rather than summing the revenue that emerged from accounts that were won during previous reporting periods.

Using revenue as a metric for sales will encourage suboptimal behaviors from sales and operations—and it will almost certainly handicap the growth of your organization.

If your salespeople attempt to sell a proposition that’s of only occasional interest to your prospective customers, it’s unlikely they will ever generate enough new sales opportunities to justify their existence.

Here’s why.

Let’s assume that you sell replacement parts for production machines and that your prospective customers only become interested in these parts when the machines break down.

If your salespeople want to pursue new business, they have no choice but to start conversations on the phone. (You can’t wander into industrial organizations unannounced anymore.)

But starting conversations with strangers isn’t easy. A capable salesperson needs to pick up the phone at least 10 times in order to engage a prospective customer—and that’s if they have a relevant proposition. But, if your proposition is only relevant to 10% of prospective customers—well, that’s a whole day of calling for a single conversation!

To fix this problem, you need to come up with a proposition that is always relevant. For example, rather than pitching replacement machine parts, you might pitch a monitoring service that identifies the imminent breakdown of critical machines.

A more relevant proposition that you can use to start a conversation at any stage of the buying cycle will enable your salespeople to start more meaningful conversations.

You should always chase the project first,  knowing that the project will lead them to stakeholders. 

Here’s why. 

Let’s assume that you sell timber ceilings into construction projects. Or maybe you sell custom tooling to the manufacturers of medical devices. Or, perhaps machines to the mining industry.

In each case, you are selling into a project environment. And that means, rather than chasing people, you should be chasing projects. Salespeople, in almost every case, do the exact opposite. They chase project stakeholders, hoping that these people will lead them to projects.

What they should do is chase projects, knowing that the projects will lead them to stakeholders.

There are two really compelling reasons for this. First, in almost every case, it’s easy to build a list of active projects using information that’s in the public domain.

And second, people who work in project environments, tend to focus on one project at a time. This means that if a salesperson approaches them to talk about the project that’s on their desk currently, the salesperson is likely to be well-received.

But, a salesperson who wants to talk about the weather will not get a good reception.

The hard truth is that if you want to grow your B2B business, you need your salespeople to pick up the phone and talk to strangers at some point in time.

But this is what salespeople call cold calling. And salespeople hate cold calling!

Well, I agree with salespeople on their dislike for cold calling but I disagree with them on the definition. Salespeople claim that a call is cold if there’s no preexisting relationship.

My view is that what makes a call cold is not the absence of a preexisting relationship, it’s the absence of a compelling proposition.

I figure, if your salespeople took to regularly calling family and friends with Amway pitches, it wouldn’t take long for those calls to turn a little chilly! Conversely, with a compelling enough proposition, almost every call to a stranger can rapidly turn warm.

So, you need to do two things. First, you need your salespeople to understand that YES, their job does require that they talk to strangers. And, second, you need to take responsibility for providing your salespeople with truly compelling propositions.

If you distribute via resellers, you don’t have salespeople, you have channel managers.

The true sale is not the transaction with the reseller it’s the ultimate transaction with the end consumer. Which prompts an interesting question. If your channel managers don’t actually sell anything, for what should they be held accountable?

If we consider the cause of the ultimate sale, it’s a collection of factors. The reseller’s proximity to customers, their range of stock, their merchandising, and the level of education of their personnel. And, of course, things like pricing and availability.

If you have appointed a reseller, you have made the assumption that a reasonable volume of sales will occur if this reseller maintains all these factors in an optimal state.

We call this state the Ideal Condition Set.

The role of your channel managers should be to migrate your resellers from their less-than-optimal current state to this Ideal Condition Set.

This means that the metric for your channel managers is the change in compliance over time with your Ideal Condition Set.

If you have multiple locations and each location generates its own profit-and-loss statement, you are most likely handicapping the performance of your organization.

Now, this is NOT the case if you are a chain of quick-service restaurants.

In a quick-service restaurant, the benefits of scale are of secondary importance to the customer. But not so in an industrial or typical B2B organization.

Industrial customers want a large range, instant availability, short lead times, and high-end engineering services. Your customers might say their preference is to do business with someone local. But this is a secondary consideration, not the primary one.

If you ask your locations to generate P&L statements then you are encouraging them to operate autonomously. And, if they operate autonomously they will definitely underperform on all of the factors that are of primary concern to industrial customers.

Worse still, you’ll tie up valuable people in low-impact Branch Manager roles, and then, as you scale, you’ll have to add another layer of management to interface with all those branch managers!

Your organization should only have one P&L.

If there’s one universal truth in sales, it’s the value of qualification. Everyone agrees that the careful qualification of prospective customers is a value adding activity.

Well, almost everyone. My position is that qualification destroys value and that it should be eliminated.

In case you’re not sure, qualification requires that the salesperson ask the prospect a couple of questions to determine whether they’re worthy of pursuit. The standard questions are, do you have budget? And, are you currently in the process of purchasing?

Obviously, qualification increases salespeople’s productivity (the percentage of opportunities they win).

But the problem is that you don’t bank percentages. You bank actual dollars. And dollars are the function of two things, productivity and volume.

While qualification increases salespeople’s productivity it dramatically reduces the number of opportunities a salesperson pursues. And, given that many prospects will not answer these questions honestly, some of the opportunities salespeople discard could actually have been won.

The net result of qualification is a happy salesperson but fewer dollars in the bank.

When folks hear my advice that the B2B sales department should be inside—staffed with people who focus exclusively on the pursuit of new business—they always ask: How could we possibly find people who’d be prepared to do such a job?

I tell them to go watch that Mike Rowe show, Dirty Jobs. Mike tells the stories of people who perform jobs that are dangerous or unpleasant, like road-kill collectors, hotel soap recyclers and much, much worse.

Comparatively, the role of an inside salesperson, isn’t so terrible. It’s true that they need to pick up the phone and talk to strangers but you gotta admit that this sounds better than recycling hotel soap!

The irony is that your most capable salespeople spend the least time selling.

And, if you want your organization to grow faster, you’ll need to recruit additional salespeople who are likely to be less capable than the ones you already have!

The problem is that your sales model most likley requires your salespeople to manage the accounts they win. This means that, as salespeople win accounts, they are gradually transformed into highly paid customer service reps. The root cause of this problem is the assumption that salespeople should be responsible for revenue. They shouldn’t. They should be responsible for growth.

The key to generating sustainable organic growth for most industrial and B2B  organizations is to transfer the responsibility for account management to Operations and focus Sales solely on the pursuit of new business.

New accounts. And new categories of business for existing accounts.

It’s much easier to add the account-management capability to your Operations group than it is to regularly hire new salespeople.

Picking up the phone and talking to strangers is hard at the best of times but if you only do it occasionally it’s impossibly painful.

Salespeople get an incredible rush from winning a new deal. But they have to endure a lot of pain on the way to that win. If they only pick up the phone occasionally, then those wins are few and far between and, worse still, they fail to achieve a flow state, which means that their calls are significantly less effective. 

If you want your salespeople to be happy and productive you need to create an environment for them where they perform a high volume of calls, with no distractions. Set up a two-hour call block in the morning and in the afternoon.  Quarantine them from all distractions (email, LinkedIn, fellow staff and so on) and encourage them to keep up the momentum for this designated call block period.  When the call block is done, let them relax, do some other tasks and prepare for the next call period.

Like riding a bike or skiing a slope, momentum is your friend!

If you want your salespeople to pursue new business, rather than tending to existing accounts and chaperoning inbound transactions, then you may have discovered this distinction is hard to make in practice.

It’s easy for salespeople to argue that every transaction is deserving of their loving attention!

So, here’s a   for splitting transactions into two groups. The ones that salespeople should be involved with and the ones that should be routed directly to Operations.

The trick is to look at inbound inquiries (all potential transactions for that matter) and ask, is this transaction ours to lose or ours to win?

This question exposes whether momentum is acting for you or against you. Is this prospective customer walking towards your organization with their checkbook—or walking towards a competitor?

The great thing about this question (ours to lose or ours to win?) is that the answer is always obvious. It stops the debate. Ours to lose transactions go directly to Operations and salespeople focus on chasing the business that would otherwise go to a competitor.

In an industrial context, there are no ad hoc transactions. Every purchase is nested under a program, whether you recognize it or not.

This is why salespeople should not be responsible for revenue.

Consider a major deal. Imagine you’re a defense contractor and you sign a $100m contract with the military.

You’d credit the salesperson with the $100m deal the day it’s signed—then you’d make Operations responsible for converting that contract into cash in the bank (over the next 10 years or so).

That $100m deal is a program. It’s an annuity that pays out $10m a year over the next 10 years.

In an industrial context, every first-time transaction is a program by default. Even if there’s no signed contract your customer will continue purchasing for years—unless you screw up!

This means that your salespeople should not be responsible for revenue. Each time they cause a first-time transaction, they should be credited with the value of the program and then they should move on.

Operations should be responsible for converting that program into cash in the bank.

If we let them, marketing people will refer to each of our products as a brand. This practice is wrongheaded and corrosive. So we shouldn’t let them.

The “brand” moniker is an attempt to abstract the reputation of a product away from its core attributes. Marketing people do that because it enables them to reverse cause and effect. It allows them to argue that you can drive the success of a product by directly engineering its reputation.

But you can’t do this in any meaningful way. Your product’s reputation (its brand) is a consequence of folks buying, using and hopefully benefiting from the product.

A great product is the cause. Brand equity is the effect.

If you want to grow your industrial organization, first, create products and services that are meaningfully differentiated from those of your competitors.

And then convince your marketing people to stop nattering away about “brands” and, instead, focus on convincing your competitor’s customers to try your product instead.

Or to put it bluntly. Support the sales effort: or go home!

If you spend a little bit of money on some SEO, some online advertising, or some content, you can generate high-quality inbound inquiries. That much is true.

But a handful of leads won’t keep your sales team busy all the time. And when you go back to the well to generate more you’ll discover that the next handful costs more. And the next handful, much, much more than that!

In an industrial or B2B context, it is rarely possible to generate anywhere near the number of leads your sales team needs if you are to outgrow your competitors.

This means you have a choice. You can dial down your growth aspirations or embrace a mix of inbound and outbound marketing.

Have you ever wondered why salespeople are so keen to get face-to-face with potential customers? Do you think it’s because potential customers like to meet with salespeople face-to-face? Most don’t!

Salespeople like to get face-to-face with potential customers because they believe that a face-to-face meeting will improve their odds of winning the deal.

It’s easy to see why salespeople hold this belief. If you divide a salesperson’s closed opportunities into two categories, based on whether or not a face-to-face meeting occurred, you’ll clearly see a higher win rate in the category with a meeting.

But that doesn’t mean that the meeting caused the higher win-rate. It might just be that prospects are more likely to agree to a face-to-face meeting with a salesperson they intend to buy from.

Salespeople should focus on pursuing deals, not face-to-face meetings. On the occasions when there IS a genuine requirement for a face-to-face meeting it’s likely that the conversation will be technical, rather than commercial, in nature—meaning that you should send an engineer, not a salesperson!

Salespeople complain regularly that they’re short of leads. “If I had more qualified leads”, they say, “I could sell more”.

Have you ever wondered why salespeople insist on distinguishing between leads and qualified leads? Well, a qualified lead is a potential customer who answers two questions in the affirmative. Are you in the process of purchasing? And, do you have budget?

Salespeople believe that a potential customer who’s not prepared to admit that they are close to purchasing is not qualified, which is to say, they are not a lead. This means that salespeople prefer to sell to folks who are already walking toward them waving their checkbooks!

I suggest redefining “lead” to mean a competitor’s existing customer. I’m suggesting that, by definition, every customer of a competitor is a potential customer of yours—and your salespeople should be pursuing them, attempting to right that wrong.

Collectively, your competitors have hundreds—if not thousands—of existing customers so, with this definition, salespeople can no longer complain that they’re short of leads.

You know, one of the first movies Vin Diesel appeared in was Boiler Room. Boiler Room was the story of a stock brokerage running pump-and-dump schemes to scam unsophisticated investors.

The brokerage had a two-tiered sales department. Junior salespeople smiled and dialled, attempting to get conversations started with prospects. And then, senior salespeople (closers) would take over those conversations, once an interested party was on the line.

In recent years, Silicon Valley has embraced the idea of an SDR. A junior salesperson who attempts to start conversations with decision-makers.

But this is NOT a new idea. This is the boiler-room model, dusted-off, with a fresh lick of paint.

Today’s SDR model has the same fatal flaw as the original boiler room. It’s appropriate only if you want to target unsophisticated buyers. And there’s a simple reason why.

S0phisticated buyers are not prepared to start conversations with junior salespeople.

If you want to do larger deals with more sophisticated buyers, capable salespeople need to pick up the phone and make that critical initial contact.

If you want to know if you have a compelling proposition for your sales team to pitch, challenge your marketing department to write their best possible headline.

Then, take that headline and delete all the adjectives.

If what’s left is less compelling, then you never had a truly compelling proposition to start with!

David Ogilvie, the father of modern advertising, advised that “if you have nothing to say, you should sing it”. Well, it turns out that adorning a nothing proposition with adjectives is a low-budget—but less entertaining—alternative to singing.

So, don’t say “faster” if you can say that “orders received before 4:00pm are delivered before 9:00am the following morning”. Don’t say “longer-lasting” if you can say that “our abrasive disk can grind 4,500 sq feet of concrete before it needs to be replaced”. And don’t say “knowledgeable” if you can say that “we have a fluid-dynamics PHD on standby to assist your designers”.

If you can’t make specific, traffic-stopping claims, then you need innovation, not adjectives.

No it does not work. Cost-plus pricing enables manufacturers to make bad pricing decisions quickly, and with impressive precision.

The cost-plus approach to pricing sums all costs (including overhead) and then adds a markup with a view to generating a target profit.

The problem is that overhead costs do NOT move in lockstep with variable costs. This means that whatever assumptions are made about profit are guaranteed to be wrong.

Furthermore, the precision associated with this approach leads people to believe that their organization sets prices, which is rarely the case.

In most cases, the market sets prices and organizations decide whether or not to take them.

And, profitability CANNOT be calculated at the transactional level. Transactions generate contribution margin, but an organization’s profitability is the difference between the rate at which it accrues contribution margin and the rate at which it accrues operating expenses.

It’s much better to use a heuristic approach to guesstimate a market price, and then adjust this number based on the current load on the production resources required to fulfill it.

I hear salespeople complaining that it takes too long to get concepts and pricing from the engineering department. Worse still, when these do arrive the concepts are unnecessarily detailed and the proposed solutions, unrealistically priced.

This is bad. Engineering should turn around concepts and pricing quickly. Concepts should be presented at the lowest resolution possible, so as to retain maximum degrees of freedom in production. And, the solution should be engineered around the market price, not developed in a vacuum and priced on a cost-plus basis.

The root-cause of these problems is a pooled engineering team. The solution is to split engineering into two groups: design engineering, which is customer-facing, and production engineering, which is production-facing.

You need distinct groups because each group’s work should be performed at a different cadence and a different level of resolution. But both of these groups should belong to the one engineering department because you benefit enormously from the creative tension between them.

The Sales department should NEVER be allowed to build its own design engineering capabilities!

If you’re a manufacturer and your director of sales believes their job is to maximize sales, this might indicate a flaw in your organizational design.

Your organization is at its most profitable when your production resources are fully loaded. (When your plant runs 3 shifts a day.)

The job of sales should be to maintain production in this state, not to sell as much as possible. Your sales team should be focused on filling holes in your production schedule and steadily increasing the yield you earn on your production resources.

If your sales department is trying to maximize sales it suggests that it was never intended (or designed) to keep production fully loaded: and this is a serious (and expensive) organizational design flaw.

To fix this, you need to rethink the design of your organization, starting with a commitment to keep production fully loaded at all times. All other departments must subordinate to this commitment.

Counterintuitively, your organization will be at its most profitable when production is fully loaded and all other departments have spare capacity.

Inbound marketing aficionados will have you convinced that inbound leads are a universal good.

But the truth is a little more complex than this.

For starters, a good percentage of inbound leads are likely to be transactional inquiries that should be routed directly to customer service.

And, it’s not a given that the remaining leads will produce the best return on your sales team’s limited capacity. One problem is that these leads will relate to a range of products, diverting salespeople’s focus from your current campaign.

If there’s a small number of them, this isn’t a problem. But if there are enough to consume more than 50% of your sales team’s capacity—but not 100%—you will find that it’s easy for salespeople to expand their work on these inbound leads to fill each day.

Our rule is that if you can’t consistently generate 100% of your team’s leads from inbound, you should add salespeople until the mix falls below 20%. That way, you can be confident that salespeople pay sufficient attention to outbound calls.

Sales meetings, properly run, have a tremendous impact on sales performance.

But most sales managers are reluctant to run them and, when they do, they run them in precisely the wrong fashion because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of motivation.

Why run a sales meeting?

We should touch on why before we get to how.

If you believe all of the common assumptions about sales commissions, you could be excused for presuming that sales meetings are redundant. After all, if salespeople are motivated to sell by the comp plan, why interrupt them with a sales meeting?

Of course, the comp plan does not guarantee positive behaviors (although it’s pretty-much guaranteed to drive a handful of negative ones) so it’s incumbent upon managers to engineer environments that harness salespeople’s natural motivation.

Sales meetings are the most important element of a carefully engineered sales environment.

Sales meetings:

1. Enable salespeople to understand the relationship between their activities and the performance of the overall organization
2. Provide salespeople with short term feedback on their performance – which is particularly important when they are working on longer-lead-time deals
3. Enable salespeople to benchmark themselves against their colleagues
4. Enable salespeople to drill critical communication techniques

How NOT to run a sales meeting

I suspect many sales managers are reluctant to run sales meetings because they believe that they need to put on a show for their salespeople. They need to train them and motivate them, after all.

But a good sales meeting is not a training session and it’s definitely not a motivational talk. A good sales meeting is an opportunity for salespeople to get reacquainted with the larger machine to which they belong and to compare their performance with that of their colleagues. For salespeople, this is inherently motivational.

Sales managers should be facilitating sales meetings, not presenting them. (It’s all about the salespeople. Not the sales manager!)

Sales meeting: run sheet

Let’s start with a run sheet for an ideal sales meeting.

7:45 Team lead reviews reporting dashboard and ensures all reports are accurate: remedies if not
8:00 Team gathers (or logs-in) and prepares for meeting
8:10 Meeting starts
Review high-level metrics, in aggregate. Sales this period, activity this period and current queue sizes (forward-booked meetings, opportunities and prospects). Confirm health of overall system.
8:15 Review metrics for each salesperson (sales, activity and queue sizes). Review list of last period’s activities and discuss what went well and what didn’t go so well. Dig deep!
8:25 Select 3-4 late-stage opportunities and discuss what’s required to increase their velocity.
8:30 Select problem area (communication skill) from previous discussion, agree on ideal technique and drill as team.
8:40 Meeting ends

Data first

The first thing that you should notice about this sales meeting is that it’s data driven.

The sales environment is a complex one. Sales opportunities are complex. The sales value chain is complex too (with researchers, campaign coordinators, sales coordinators, salespeople and project leaders all working together to originate and prosecute opportunities). And the larger organization adds still more complexity (with sales needing to interface effectively with customer service and engineering, etc). Plus, to add insult to injury, each salesperson is likely to be engaged with up to 100 sales opportunities at any one point in time.

It’s okay to voice opinions as long as they are opinions about data – as opposed to opinions masquerading as data!
It’s simply impossible to have a meaningful discussion about sales without all team members staring at the one dashboard. It’s okay to voice opinions as long as they are opinions about data – as opposed to opinions masquerading as data!

You should design your dashboard around your sales meeting – and not the other way around.

If you don’t have a fancy dashboard, at a minimum, examine salespeople’s calendars in your sales meeting (in conjunction with opportunity lists in CRM). Get salespeople to use group calendaring properly – and to color-code meetings by type.

To have a meaningful conversation, you must look at both the progress of opportunities and the effort expended to generate that progress. You and your salespeople must develop an intimate understanding of the relationship between effort and velocity.

Dig deep

Most sales managers are reluctant to ask questions of salespeople.

Not me! If I’m talking to a salesperson I want to know why a prospect is likely to buy. I want to know why it makes sense for the prospect’s organization. And I want to know how the prospect will benefit if they say yes and suffer if they don’t. I want to know the name of the prospect’s manager and their key subordinates. I want to know all kinds of stuff.

It’s not that I really need this information. The issue is that I want to know that the salesperson has a profound understanding of the opportunity. And I also know that verbalizing this understanding is likely to result in breakthrough ideas.

If you suspect that your sales manager isn’t digging deep you need to sit-in on their sales meetings and show them how it’s done. There’s no avoiding the fact that a sales manager must be a true leader (especially given the nature of salespeople).

Collaborate

On the subject of leadership, the sales manager needs to foster a collaborative environment in sales meetings. Team members should feel free to praise and criticize their colleagues’ performance, so long as there’s a clear understanding that team members are, in fact, members of a team (who share a common goal).

If you’ve ever had a great coach in a sporting environment, you know how this works.

If salespeople are not role playing then they are not training. It’s true that in sports and the military there’s classroom instruction – but this instruction is preparation for the training, not the training itself.

You learn skills by doing drills. And in sales, you drill by role playing. End of story. Salespeople (like athletes) should ideally do drills every day (whether they enjoy it or not). At a minimum there should be 10 minutes reserved for drills in every sales meeting.