sales operations Archives

What Day Is Laundry Day?

When you think about laundry, what comes to mind? Lost socks? The folding? Or maybe you simply don’t like to do laundry (like the 100+ year-old woman I saw interviewed on Johnny Carson many, many years ago. “What don’t you miss?” asked Carson. “Warshing Dey!” She exclaimed) . A lot of what I write about centers on lean thinking the application to Smart Sales Operations. But I’m not just about smart sales operations. As I’ve stated elsewhere, I think about efficiencies and how to get more efficient all the time—in every facet of my life.

And one evening when I found myself conversing about doing laundry with a fellow hockey player, I realized my obsession with cranking through laundry wasn’t only my secret obsession. He and I were both about getting laundry clean and put away as quickly and as efficiently as possible. It was our children and spouses who created our OCD, but the growth in our compulsion was through experience: things like finding mildewed wet loads left in the washer and our bedrooms and family members’ various pieces of furniture looking as if hit by a yard sale. Clothes laid on furniture instead of put away in closets or drawers–basically clean clothes left out for cats to sleep on and children to pile up dirty over clean. So, he and I discussed how we crank it out, getting from dirty to clean to put away in one fluid and very compressed event.

How does clean, folded laundry relate to Smart Sales Operations? First, let me clarify if any have concern about me doing the laundry versus my wife please understand that I have no issue. My dad and his generation might, but me? I just want it done. And since I work out of my house, I do most of the laundry. I ended up taking it over completely when I started working out of my home, and what clinched it was one of my past companies had a series of calls every Monday morning which were interminable. Since I was an hour ahead of the main office, by the time our calls ended it was usually noon my time.

To make better use of that time, I started throwing in laundry before the first Monday call and transfer loads in between the queue of calls, pulling clothing from the dryer so things wouldn’t wrinkle, and then when all the calls and laundry were finished, take it upstairs for eventual folding.

Now, don’t judge my parenting skills, but the intent was then to have my children (and sometimes my wife) fold their clothes. Or, what usually would happen is the clothes would sit in a chair in the bedroom and I would end up folding them— on the following Sunday.

So what really happened is clean laundry sat for week in the chairdrobe. Sometimes it would sit for more than a week depending on my travel schedule and what I had going on that weekend. There might be two weeks of clean clothing in my bedroom chair waiting for folding. My children would ask where particular items were and I would palm my forehead wondering if they understood where the clean clothes were and what they were capable of–that is, folding and putting laundry away as well me.

And then one day, many years after I had been away from the company where I formed this habit, I realized doing laundry on Monday wasn’t achieving what I really wanted, which was to get everything completed in one day. My habit created a situation that hung over my head. In the vein of David Allen, think Getting Things Done, I wasn’t getting things done or prioritizing so I could get things done.

The epiphany came one day when I had to do the laundry on a Friday. Per my usual, I finished everything and had it upstairs in a day, and then realized when folding it on Sunday I only had two days between getting the dirty laundry clean and getting the clean laundry put away.

Eureka!

If I were in manufacturing, this would be akin to combining assembly stations or cutting out a step where the next pick in line had to wait to add value to the product.

Do you see why this relates? Why I got excited enough about this to write about it? By rethinking what I was trying to achieve (clean, folded laundry) I had to change how I approached my timeline to get it done. I went from a process which could take up to seven days to one that takes only up to three.

Part of the struggle evangelizing Smart Sales Operations is there are two jobs to do: first is to educate what is “Smart Sales Operations”. Second is to point to the company’s sales operations and get them to see it could be better. The best possible outcome is they “get it” and engage to correct. Sadly, what I’ve come to learn is most companies and most people don’t realize they have a problem in their sales operations. Like my laundry, they just don’t see that gap of four days, because things work well enough that it isn’t apparent to them—so they don’t acknowledge the pain it is causing because the expected outcome has never been measured. Because no data has been applied to their process, the end users downstream live with it because it is all they have. It is very much like cutting the end off the ham.

Think about your company processes. Where are there forms, reports or reporting which are redundant or extraneous? Or where do expectations march along without too much question because management isn’t affected by them? Where are the places in your sell chain where you are unaware of the friction it creates for their sales reps? (This is a “known unknown” and will be addressed later.)

And, we all have the same thing going on in our personal lives. We have habits, and we have training, and we have our way of executing—it takes a lot for us to raise up our heads and look around with fresh eyes. We tend to do what we know, and judge from a our perspective

We are always capable of learning new things—and your company is desperate for change, believe it or not.

So, what are you going to look at anew? Better yet, when? The sooner the better.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

Work, Working Hard & Work Ethic: The Non-Intersection of the Three

First off, let me discuss guilt.

Not your Jewish mother type of guilt (“You never call me.” “But Mom, I spoke with you two days ago!”)

Or guilt around felony like circumstances (you are on your own there).

But guilt around work and effort. Not in a high school physics sense (W = f*d), but time put in for tasks involved, and overcoming guilt around how much time is enough.

In sales, one could be working 24x7x365, because really, there is always something you could be doing, like more prospecting, more marketing, more networking, more customer touches…the list goes on. In this regard, selling is an endless job, allowing those who can’t say “no” to answer to their inner guilt and do “just one more thing”. A sales rep’s personal stake to produce has a lot of guilt tied to it. Add to it management’s expectations and this guilt boils down to time spent at work.

There are a lot of expectations, and being up to speed on your field of expertise is one them. One of the things which I do a LOT of is read. It is the primary method of finding out the what of my industry, not to mention the primary method of communication in my industry. But I have guilt when I am reading articles related to my industry, because it is taking time away from doing things with my job. But, my job is dependent upon me being up to speed on things on my industry, which in turn makes me a more effective salesperson, so I need to read.

Today, I read about “Work Ethic”. I’ve been following IS Survivor Keep the Joint Running since the 1990’s, and I like a lot of what he has to say, and this treatise is no exception. Then I read his post from 2004, and what I realized is my inner Jewish mother is killing me.

Work ethic

Working less for fun and profit

If I were you looking at the title of this post: Work, Working Hard & Work Ethic, the Non-Intersection of the Three I would wonder what I’m getting at, and if I’m just advocating being lazy. But I’m not–really!

What I mean is that you have a job. If you do your job, you are merely on cruise control. If you do your job and work at it diligently, then you are “working hard” and if you ask for other projects, even though they’ll cut into family time, then you have displayed what many would call a “work ethic”.

My problem with all this is comes down to expectation. If I am hired for a sales position and given a quota, then however I achieve that quota should be of no concern to anyone. If I achieve my quota with 20 hours a week of work, then my management shouldn’t care, they should revel in and repeat my results. But if I don’t achieve my quota and am working 50 to 80 hour weeks, something is wrong, especially if I’m closer to 80 than 50.

In my last corporate selling position, there was a lot of “busy-ness”. Endless amounts of time used on tasks which weren’t enabling. Paper trail tasks to CYA for management, along with endless troubleshooting calls for products which were still not ready for prime time. In the end, my colleagues and I estimated out of a standard 40-hour work week we were in some sort of corporate exercise for up to 30 hours. But the expectation was still to hit the numbers placed before us–a minimum number of meetings, training and prospecting. When I asked my peers how they were fairing, none of them had achieved the minimum expectations across all KPIs.* In addition, due to the number of meetings during the day, it meant most evening/nights and weekends were taken up with answering e-mails.

This was on top of an unstable culture which didn’t provide any psychological sense of safety (a topic for another post), so the feeling the hammer could come down anytime was very real. This means a lot of hours were put in under the thumb of uncertainty.

Okay, you say, enough grousing. What is the solution?

Lean processes. It is the focus of this blog and it just doesn’t go away.

There are many things which could have happened to alleviate the sheer number of hours logged, but the biggest contributor would have been expectations backed by data. How many calls should a rep be expected to make? How many meetings, physical or virtual, should a rep be expected to make. And if we set this bar, what data have we used for this number?

Let me run with the meeting idea: Let’s say the expectation is 12 face-to-face meetings a week. Each meeting lasts 1 hour. The travel time to and from the meetings we’ll estimate at an hour total. Planning and set up calls for each meeting I’ll estimate at 30 minutes (I’m being very light on this estimate, since some meetings can take a lot of time and innumerable e-mails/phone calls to set up just to get all the moving parts aligned), which totals 6 hours, and all in, our rep has 30 hours out of a standard 40-hour work week already spoken for. Now add in corporate overhead, like standing meetings, etc. (see above). If it was at 30 hours like I mentioned, then the total for the week is 60 hours. And this hasn’t included time for prospecting, marketing efforts, shows, lunch and bio-breaks.

If the rep has a family, then he is probably trying to shoehorn children’s events and/or spousal commitments in some of the interstices. And then, the inevitable opening of the laptop late night to answer e-mails before the start of the next day.

If expectations were set on data, even if the numbers were set north of where the current data resides, they would still be based upon something versus opinion.

Recently in a newsletter I received, the author talked about what your worst salespeople could be telling you. One of the first things which stands out to me is the average tenure of a rep. I’ve mentioned this as a statistic before in the regard to how disruptive this is to the continuity of selling. But in regard to this article, I think it misses the mark. I know some excellent sales reps and they aren’t leaving because they suck, they are leaving because management isn’t listening to them. When excellent reps realize they are being hamstrung by corporate BS, impacting their earning potential, they leave as quickly as possible. Then, the second thing which caught my attention was “2. That You Are Tolerating Underperformance” (his typo, not mine). The author pulls info from Selling Power magazine, and talks about managing the rep through setting milestones. Five bullet points about managing through milestones, but not once a mention of how those milestones were created. Without any data, the milestone is meaningless. I can set milestones (“Grandma, although your in your mid-seventies, go run a mile today with your bum knee. Today you do it in 12 minutes, tomorrow we’ll expect 10.”) but they don’t mean anything unless balanced against data: historical data, growth data and revenue data, to mention a few.

Suffice it to say, when setting up KPIs or minimum activity standards, you have to look at what is exceptional and what would be known to produce failure. Then, target the 80th percentile and see what happens. Tweak, tune, or scrap depending upon outcomes.

But don’t just spitball it. Because if you do, you will find yourself in a situation where people aren’t achieving your expectations, no matter what your opinion is about it.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

*If a company issues unattainable KPIs, then they are setting the rep up for failure, because if they wanted to get rid of the rep then they have the proof. Not a very ethical practice, but it does happen.

Foundational HR

Many years ago, when I was in my first real job, I worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer. As was becoming the fashion but is now de riguer, employees were required to take training from human resources for employee interaction, needs identification and conflict resolution.

At the time, it consisted of getting a group of employees together to watch a VHS video coupled with an instructor-led discussion of the different scenarios involved and what could have been done better–initially, during and after the interaction.

One of these videos stands out even after all these years. I’ve tried to track it down online, but it has probably been shelved since the fashions were out of date even when I viewed it the first time. The screen resolution was striped and grainy from repeated viewings. What stood out then and still stands out in my mind though was how it addressed what I consider foundational HR issues and things like responsibility to oneself and co-workers.

In the video, a woman sitting at her desk picks up her phone and calls a person in another department. The co-worker is male and works in IT. With few pleasantries, the woman demands help. The co-worker, in return, is short with her. The conversation ends and the woman is upset and escalates to management. Management intervenes and basically coaches the pair on how to play nice.

The group discussion I was involved with focused on characters in the video, Fred* and Velma, and their method of requesting and responding. To make the HR point, the scene and its message were supposed to be cut and dried, so I don’t fault the video or its script writers for the intended message conveyed. What raised my eyebrows was how the people who viewed the video missed what I considered the Foundational HR flaw.

So, back to the scene: after Velma hangs up the phone (remember, this was before chat and texting), she turns in her chair and complains to her co-worker about Fred. What a miserable SOB he is, etc. The co-worker nods her head sympathetically. The scene cuts to Fred, who has turned to his co-worker and is complaining about Velma wasting his time. Then he states that THIS IS THE SECOND TIME THIS WEEK HE HAS SHOWN HER HOW TO DO THIS.

After this, we, the observers, discussed how Fred and Velma should have handled the conflict. There were a lot of soft suggestions like “use a nicer tone”, and “apologize for behavior”. But something didn’t sit right with me, so I raised my hand and said, “Velma or Fred should have written down the instructions.” The discussion leader eyed me coolly and paused…and then went to another raised hand. Being young I allowed her stare to quell any further pursuit of my observation and we got back to what an SOB Fred was.

This baffled me, as the crux of the problem and what created the conflict was that Velma again needed information which was provided previously provided. The conflict was a result, but not the fundamental issue.

No wonder Fred was upset–he was just berated by someone who demanded help for a task he had already shown them how to do. The video focused on Fred and Velma’s interaction and response and how they should have handled it.

Now a few caveats. I understand the intent of the video was to demonstrate how to communicate with co-workers better. It is important as an adult to communicate our ideas and opinions without devolving into an argument and hurt feelings. People need to treat each other civilly in an office environment (and elsewhere!). And, learning better ways to express anger and frustration and avoid hostilities is important.

Some important information: First, being the monkeys we are, to quell our simian roots we begin training the our control of emotions starting at birth. Many parents call this “manners”. Second, many tasks need more than one walk through before they become fluid. Third, as the little aphorism says, “Your crisis is not my crisis,” so escalating it by screaming, yelling, arm waving, foot stamping, etc. will only make it your crisis with me responding to it with matching anger. Fourth, if the proper foundations were in place, then when this crisis appeared, its escalation would match its criticality–one does not yell “fire” in the movie theater if they see only the glow of a cigarette (not applicable today, but it was many moons ago). And fifth, if Velma had been shown the process earlier, then there should have been some documentation around to jog her memory when she was required to repeat it.

If you are familiar with six sigma and its brethren 5S, then an appendage to the 5S methodology is to incorporate a system to make information available when it is needed: right now, in a week or in a month. What Velma needed was not another explanation–that just pulls Fred away from his work and doesn’t guarantee Velma future issues–but an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), guide, tool or template to follow to get to a point where she can complete the process on her own. If that means further training with Fred, then that needs to be built into a plan. If it means Fred left Velma with instructions or Velma took notes, then that needs to be built into a plan.

So…a few years later, different company, same video, and another instructor led discussion with a different instructor. When it came up as to what Fred and Velma should have done differently, I raised my hand and stated my same premise as before. When the instructor paused with her stare this time (they must be coached this), I continued with my observation that the solution was to make sure either Fred had left enough information with Velma or Velma had enough information from Fred so that both could go on their way and neither would have had to have angry words. Even if planning to meet again at another time for more training was better than demanding someone help you. This time I only got a little sigh from the instructor.

The moral is if you have incorporated a plan, procedure or SOP for foundational activities and information, then you won’t have to deal with Fred and Velma and their bad interaction. You could probably even hire Shaggy and Scooby to do the work for mere snacks because you would have such a great plan in place you could hire just about anyone–even a talking dog–and they could figure out the work because of all your wonderful documentation.

In the end, planning and documenting should be part of any process. When you onboard someone, you have a plan, right? Right?

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

*My apologies to Hanna-Barbera

Productivity

I am going to preface the following by telling you I am a big believer in Lean. Most people think of Lean Methodology as something only for manufacturing, but more and more people are coming to see organizations can implement Lean practices to improve operations and internal harmony. Dan Markovitz is an avid proponent of this philosophy and he is one of my influences when I’m consulting for companies, or thinking how companies could be better.

Recently, I was listening to a book-on-CD (yes, I still do that) by Womack & Jones called Lean Thinking. The title caught my eye because I thought it would be in line with my thinking. Alas, the book, written originally in 1997, is focused on manufacturing and the gains to be had by using lean practices. But something the narrator said caught my attention and it is completely applicable to sales and sales operations.

Briefly, the discussion was around “muda” or “waste” (the big three are muda, mura & muri or waste, overburden & unevenness). In Lean Manufacturing, waste is money down the drain, either by time or production. But where it is easier (but maybe not just easy) to track down waste in a manufacturing line, the 3M’s , but mostly muda, can be seen constantly in business on the sales and marketing side.

And this is the crux of smart sales operations–we look at sales processes as additive. What do I mean? I mean instead of looking at how a sales rep gets their work done and how do we extract information from that work stream, we layer a process on that sales rep to report on that work stream.

Let me give you an example to illustrate. A new sales rep is given a book of accounts in a given territory. Then, the sales rep is given a tool like a CRM, to prospect into these accounts, build a pipeline and funnel and start to close deals. Most of you are probably nodding your head in agreement, “Yes, that’s how it’s done.” Next, management wants to track the progress of the rep, so they ask the rep to produce a report. “No big deal,” you say, as all the rep has to do is create a report in the CRM and run it and give it to management. Then, management wants to know where deals stand, so they ask the rep to produce a report. Again, you may say, “No big deal,” and the rep produces another report. Soon, management wants to meet to go over the reports, which by now has grown to multiple reports and multiple meetings. The sales representative who was hired to sell has now become a reporting fool, spending significant time on administrative tasks, and trying to figure out how to balance their time with the other priorities of the job–like achieving quota.

As a personal example, my most recent experience was a manager who asked us to create a report used only by himself so he could present the team numbers to his management, showcasing the manager in the best light possible. The report was tedious, arduous and an exercise in frustration as it required two or more hours to produce each time (it was a Word doc, and none of the information gathering could be automated). This, coupled with the one hour accompanying meeting to go over the report and then the additional one hour meeting with the team to go over the collective reports was almost criminal in how much time it sucked. When confronted about this (as every rep had) the manager would say with his default response, “It only takes five minutes.”

Tying this back to Lean, what was wrong here? Waste. Waste of time, of processes and specifically of consideration. (While you might feel consideration can’t be wasted, how many times have you thrown your hands up in the air when your patience has reached its maximum? If someone who has been trying your patience continues to come back to you with the same issue again and again, you would more than likely snap, tell them about your frustration and tell them to get their problem fixed before they came back to you again.)

The problem for all this is a foundational issue: If the data has been captured in the beginning, then there should be no reason it couldn’t be pulled in an automated report. Computers are great at manipulating data, it is what they are built to do. So why was (I’m sorry, is–he’s still doing it) my manager wasting his team’s time to pull data he could have pulled? Because he didn’t value his team’s time. Why, as in the first example, is management layering on a report when the data for the report is readily available if it is being captured in the first place?

Smart Sales Operations deals with these issues in a foundational manner. We need to first look at what’s being sold, what is important information for the sales rep to keep track of and what is important information which sales management needs for visibility, and we build our tools around the information needed.

Recently I was having a discussion with a former manager of mine who has gone on to sales performance consulting. Our disciplines overlap a little, but his perspective on sales comes from a different angle than mine–he is looking to use tools to get more out of the reps, and I am looking at what is in place which can removed/tweaked/re-worked to produce better results. In the end, we both are working with companies to get more sales, for as I have said before, if the rep is making money, then the company is making money. Anyway, back to the conversation, he is a huge proponent of Salesforce. He believes it is infinitely tweakable enough to put processes in place to get the desired behaviors from the reps. My take on Salesforce is that it has morphed from a tool for the rep to manage customer interactions cradle to grave, becoming a reporting tool for management. While my former manager and I both see each other’s perspective, what I think is at the overlap of this Venn diagram is data. What is captured, what is needed, what is reported.

I’ve spoken about clean data before, and I am a huge proponent of data hygiene. But also in consideration is what data needs to be collected and how does this affect how the collector goes about their job. Because if your sales rep is spending more time creating reports, collecting data and meeting with their managers, then they aren’t out in front of customers doing what they were hired to do. They may be internally productive, but overall, they are not PRODUCTIVE.

Help your reps be productive. No muda.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Clean Data

How many times have you received a piece of mail at your work or residence, and the address is correct but the recipient isn’t? The addressee ranges from someone who’s name is close to yours with the typos creating new and interesting aliases to people who sometime in the past lived or worked at the address. The most entertaining these are riffs on the names of people who may have lived or worked at that address combined with some sort of database which creates new people that never existed possibly living/working there. Then there is the case of my mom is receiving retirement home solicitations at my home address (in another city) although she’s never received a piece of mail there.

For a while I sold database and database tools and one of the most fascinating was one which cleaned up address lists. While this may seem a mundane exercise in data de-duplication, it is important and very common for contact lists, and this particular tool had broader application. For example, one company which was considering buying it was a natural gas provider. Of the hundreds of thousands addresses, they had a percentage of their customers who would move, not pay their bill and reappear at another address and sign up for service and use a variant of their name–different enough not to be flagged, but correct enough to allow them to sign up for service. They would have an address which might be a multi-family unit and have several people sign up for service at that address, and if they were all “P Smith” but actually different people, they had a billing problem.

Also, when the gas company would go to mail bills, if they had correct customer name information but incorrect address information, then the bill wouldn’t get to the address and the customer would be correct in not paying as they had never received notice. And last, incorrect recipients and addresses created waste (i.e., lost dollars and trash entering the waste stream) in the thousands of unneeded or possibly duplicate mailings.

So why does this matter for Sales Operations? Even though this was many years ago when snail mail was the predominate form of billing, correct information was at the crux of getting paid. Clean data is the foundation of smooth sales operations. And where clean data starts is the first time a prospect, company or customer is created in your CRM.

There are a few schools of thought in how to build prospects into a database–whether someone should be able to create an individual or be required to create a company in the CRM, but it is my opinion that the first thing is to create the company, and all data flows from there.

Believe it or not, this very activity is fraught with challenge. When the rep goes to create a company, have they done their due diligence? Is this prospect a subsidiary or the corporate HQ? and does the CRM have a process for creating parent/child businesses? Does the business have to have an address? And does this address have to be a corporate address or can it be local? Is the address a billing address or physical address or both? It goes on and on.

And while a lot can go awry in the entry of a new company, there is a step which should never be skipped and which should have penalties associated with it for skipping or for willful avoidance. And that is CHECKING FOR DUPLICATES. Why yell this at you with all caps? Because if a rep enters a company in a second (or third, or fourth…) time, it can throw off billing, accounting, quoting–a whole host of downstream issues which many times cannot be corrected later, corrected easily or corrected at all. And you may ask, why a penalty? Because many times I have seen where a rep has created a new account because the prospect they are working with is listed in another rep’s name. So instead of going to their sales manager about switching the account into their name, or possibly split/give up some money to the current account owner, they simply create a new account in the CRM. But in creating a new account, they create also create confusion and a new burden for smooth operations.

The burden lies with the information owner. If it is the sales rep’s responsibility to prospect and enter new companies into the database, then they need to follow specific guidelines to ensure the foundational elements are put in place the right way. Also, I have heard many reps say they don’t have time to enter all the information right then, which is fine, but they have to enter the minimum CORRECTLY. Here is my list of basic, correct info which should be entered:

Company name, spelled correctly, with proper capitalization and punctuation
- “Vern’s Pig Farm” vs. “verns pig frm”
HQ Address
Location Address of the customer the rep is dealing with.
Contact (customer or prospect) name, spelled correctly with proper capitalization and punctuation and a correct e-mail address.
Billing info (I’ll cover all required for this in another post)
Delivery address (see the above comments about “correctly”).
Correct phone numbers (again, I will cover this in another post).

Last, the one thing which can be the biggest impedance to getting correct data entered can be how the company has structured what data is required to create an entry. What do I mean? At some companies, when a prospect is created, the creator is required to enter specific information to create the record. For instance, if I am entering “Vern’s Pig Farm” I might be required to enter an e-mail address as well as a phone number. If that information isn’t handy, then many people will enter filler information, like “212-555-1212” (don’t get me started about formatting…) or an email which is “xyz@vernspigfarm.com”. Can you see the problem? Right away, I’ve entered bad info which quickly propagates into a cascade of bad actions. E-mail marketing campaigns, telephone prospecting and follow up, etc. It is my opinion the minimum information needed to create a company should be a business name and a business phone number. And before that rep (or whomever) can create that company, there is a mandatory duplicate check.

This topic, essentially Data Hygiene, can go on ad nauseam, but always keep this one fact about data in mind: it is easier to start with the correct information than to go back and fix it.

Measure twice, cut once.

What are you doing to keep your data clean?

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Smart Sales Operations – Front Office vs. Back Office – Getting Paid, Part I

One of my early sales managers used to say, “The sale isn’t final until you get paid.” And he meant me getting paid, not the company. And after many years of doing sales, I found out he spoke the truth. Why is this important in the understanding of Sales Operations? Because the entire company runs on the back of what is sold.

Jeffrey Gitomer says, “Nothing happens until somebody makes a sale.” (I’m paraphrasing here, but run with it) Loosely translated, a company has to sell something to have a company: to make payroll, to invest in marketing, to pay salaries, to have admin and HR and…the list goes on and on. But what is meant to be understood but not stated, is that your customer has to pay you for whatever has been sold for all the aforementioned to happen.

This is a critical piece. It can’t be emphasize enough how important it is to recognize getting paid for whatever has been sold completes the sale. And why am I emphasizing this so much? Because there are a lot of factors which can impede getting paid, and many of them reside within your company.

Let’s run with a scenario. At Company X, when a sales rep gets a purchase order, excitement reigns. Dollar signs flash in the reps’ eyes as they think of commissions, swimming pools and movie stars. But the PO only represents a promise to pay–first the customer needs to receive the goods or services ordered. So next step after the PO, in most companies, is the rep enters the order into a system. From there, it usually goes to various and sundry hands for further massaging and parsing to ensure the proper goods and/or services are delivered to the customer.

Here’s where Sales Operations can shine or stumble. In Six Sigma*, scrutinizing the manufacturing line for places where things can or do go wrong is expected. In sales, the process for order fulfillment is more like an archaeological dig, where process which were in place when the company started still exist, and things like root suckers appear, added on like riders to congressional bills wending their way through the approval process. People (management, administrators, the reps themselves) add approval check boxes, form distributions, departmental approvals and eventually, you have a mess.

To achieve the best process, streamlined and elegant, companies should strive for one version of the truth. When the rep places the order, all necessary information to complete the sale is captured up front. (In my ideal world, when the rep identifies the prospect, this data is entered into the CRM or crosschecked/confirmed against data if it is existing). Billing address, shipping address, PO number, contacts for billing, contacts for receiving, contacts for payment resolution, the name of the end user–whatever is needed to make sure the order can be processed. And, it should be set up in such a way that information which is needed repeatedly or will be used again doesn’t have to manually entered each time–the more times a number, address, name, value, etc. has to be entered, the greater the chance there will eventually be a mistake.

In many companies, streamlining the process is difficult because the system which is set up has too many people involved to initiate an order. In other companies, initiating the order is easy, but pushing it through the levels of approval requires hand holding by the rep–taking him or her away from their original job description, which is selling.

So with all of this back office process, what is the ultimate goal of the company and the sales representative?

To get paid.

Are you sure your processes are leading to this ultimate goal?

Now, think about things at your company. Is the same true? Are there processes in place which you know are unneeded but because there is still a blank field on the page you make someone enter a value–any value–because you haven’t gotten rid of it?

Your task this week: walk a few orders through your process from start to finish. Question everything. See if there aren’t some things which could be pared down, combined or left out completely.

And begin to make the changes which enable Smart Sales Operations.

*For great reading on Six Sigma applied to knowledge workers, I highly recommend reading Dan Markovitz’s blog: http://www.markovitzconsulting.com/blog/

More on Front Office v. Back Office next week.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

Onboarding – Smart Sales Operations

Onboarding is the set of processes companies have in place to bring on new hires. In the computer and networking world, this includes provisioning and access to necessary systems. But there is more than just getting the new hire an e-mail address. For instance, what happens when a new sales rep gets hired? Do you have a rigorous process? or do you wing it?

What happens at your company? And what happened to your new hires in the past? And after reading this, what are your plans for future hires?

Apple is famous for its user friendliness, whether it be hardware or software, and Apple receives praise for the simplicity and functionality of its designs. And because people at Apple think about how something is or will be used, a lot of problems which an end user would potentially have encountered are circumvented. Through use testing, glitches are identified and eliminated. The burrs which would blister the experience are smoothed.

One story I remember* regarding Apple was their packaging strategy for their early systems. When the end user received their new computer and opened the box, Apple led them through it using a string. Yes, a string. Once the lid was open, the top sheet had a string attached to it, and as the user pulled things out of the box, the string connected each piece sequentially so that the owner set up the monitor, the power and the CPU in proper order, and when completed, turned on a fully functioning system. Even if the end user had no idea what each part was or where things went, Apple’s system eliminated the guesswork of putting together the computer.

That string is really a kinesthetic checklist. And I’m a big believer in checklists. If you have the chance, I recommend reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. It is a great guide to looking at situations where checklists can be implemented, and in many of Gawande’s examples, save lives.

So back to onboarding. Is there a checklist in place? One which describes the steps which should happen as a person is brought into a company? A series of checklists can and should be in place for all aspects of the new hire process, such as interviewing, first day, first week, first quarter and first year.

For example, interviewing:
Have they filled out an application?
Spoken to the correct people in the area which they will work?
Gotten rubber stamped by the hiring chain of command?
Been tendered an offer letter?
Have they accepted?
Set a start date?

Once they’ve set a start date, does the company have an internal checklist to get things done? Most companies think of obvious things like health benefits and payroll, but what about laptops, cell phones, and business cards? What about training? In our current era of “faster, faster”, many times companies leave out things because they believe it only takes up time, but what they are really doing is increasing the ramp up time.

How? Because they aren’t giving the new hire the tools to be successful internally. What makes someone become part of a company? Is it because they are given an employee ID? Or is it because they interact with HR, engineers, other sales people and admin.

One company where I started many years ago, I sat for three weeks without a working laptop. When I got my laptop I was told to order business cards–and I didn’t know how to do that and no one had taken time to write it down. All processes were tribal knowledge–and I wasn’t part of the tribe quite yet.

Action item for the week: look at your onboarding process and determine if you take a new hire completely through your company’s processes–with no assumptions of “they should know how to do that”–because many won’t.

You don’t want your new hire to be waiting around for three weeks to start becoming one of your team.

*I say remember because I can’t confirm it’s true–please correct me if I’m wrong!

More on onboarding later. Next week we begin Front Office v. Back Office.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Smart Sales Operations

Well, it happened. I finally had enough and decided I had to take out my frustrations by hammering tiny little keys with my angry fingers.

“Enough? Enough of what?” you may ask. Enough of letting the small things become the big impediments which ruin my sales and my ability to sell. Things which companies can easily control that affect the sale, but most of the time never try to correct or even identify.

I’m talking about Sales Operations.

This blog will deal with using Smarts to produce operations which enable sales. Processes, process, progress. The infrastructure of selling. I have been a vocal proponent of sales infrastructure long before things like CRM became mainstream. And before I attacked my keyboard, I did a little research on the current state of Sales Operations and the information available for Sales Operations. There wasn’t much. If there was some it was usually tied to a product. While it would be great if I were to be hired to consult, my real goal is to make you, the reader, really think about the operations which are in motion behind the sales person and a sale.

This will not deal with any selling methodology, that is, the how, the why, the close or the cold call and various topics around sales methodology. That topic has been and continues to be covered by a lot of individuals and companies–some who are right, and some who think they are right. Although some methodology might creep into my noodling, my focus is concerning the administration and tracking and enabling which goes hand-in-hand with sales; I rarely see it given a proper nod in acknowledgement of its criticality.

I liken it to architecting infrastructure. We are incredibly dependent upon background services like plumbing, electricity and climate control. These pieces of physical infrastructure work in the background and our expectations are very high for up-time, with little tolerance (emotionally or physically) for downtime. These conveniences run in the background of our life, and we rarely think about them, but when they go down or are impeded in some way, we know. A stoppage makes us realize how interwoven these services are in our life, and how one hiccup creates a cascade effect of issues.

So, to further extend the analogy…

Without really realizing it, people worry a lot about pooping. Not everyone is having outright conversations about pooping, but there are commercials for toilet bowl cleaners so one has a clean potty to poop in, the Squatty Potty so they can be more effective at pooping, commercials for laxatives, fiber boosters, constipation relievers (to start the pooping process), and lots of marketing for toilet paper–the finale to the pooping process. We all know a lot about toilet paper. The brands, the textures, the softness, their roll sizes. The sales and marketing for toilet paper brands has been memorable, plentiful and pervasive. But toilet paper matters for naught if one cannot get the effluent out of their house. All of this peripheral conversation around pooping means nothing if when you flushed, the poop didn’t leave your house. You really wouldn’t be too worried about how clean your toilet was or what brand of toilet paper you used if you couldn’t flush it away. You would really be worried about how to get rid or your waste–or become acutely aware of the build up pretty quickly.

So it is thinking like this which I realize makes me The Infrastructure Guy. I like to think about the “how” — How do we make things better by refining, streamlining and studying issues to provide solutions. Similar to Six Sigma in manufacturing, but for sales and selling. And this blog will provide my thoughts, insights and experiences on how to enable the sales force to achieve more sales by implementing Smart Sales Operations.

What is one thing a business can do to streamline its process? First thing: on-boarding.

PS The Infrastructure Guy and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.