sales process Archives - 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.