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In his new book, Sales Process Excellence, Michael J. Webb advocates iterative, process-oriented, approaches to improving sales performance. In his view, there’s a missing link that hinders most companies from achieving sales process excellence: a lack of performance analytics that let everyone see how today’s practices are affecting tomorrow’s results. The details:
Executives today lack data that show which marketing and sales activities are creating which results. Decisions are typically based on revenue results supplemented with anecdotes, hunches, and politics. This doesn’t reveal the 20% of the work that produces 80% of the results, nor how to replicate it.
As a result, sales performance management remains a guessing game guided by hunches. Root causes of problems remain hidden from view. Usual fixes (more training, revised compensation, etc.) fail. Command and control reigns. As Webb notes, “You cannot increase revenue directly, any more than you can raise a room’s temperature by holding a lighter under the thermostat. Attempts to push customers to ‘make your numbers’ typically only succeed in delaying sales or eroding margins, or both.”
It’s a results-oriented approach that lacks contexts — disappointing results are the natural outcome.
Process excellence, by contrast, provides methods for improving results by knowing what affects them — with operational definitions of what matters and observable evidence of what’s occurring in the sequence of events it takes to convert sales efforts to sales results.
Such methods provide the performance frameworks for knowing what to measure and what to look for in the metrics you subsequently capture. They create fresh conversations, amongst peers, on what’s working and what isn’t. They enable continuous improvements through continuous learning from constant experimentation. They provoke small, useful, changes in sales practices that actually stick. Done right, such methods create pictures of what’s working that let teams of colleagues see, collectively, what they could not see individually.
It’s a process-oriented approach with transparent contexts — better results are the natural outcome.
Webb’s perspectives echo what McKinsey has concluded: breakthroughs in performance are normally preceded by revolutions in measurement. Want breakthrough sales results? Bring on that sales measurement revolution. There’s emerging proof that it can improve performance ‘beyond the odds’.
John Cousineau is the founder and CEO of innovative information inc., makers of Amacus. His firm provokes improved B2B sales productivity by helping sales teams see + improve the buyer value of their sales practices. Follow John at @jcousineau.
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