I just had a call from a client who owns a make-to-order manufacturing firm (building materials) in New Zealand. Chris was agitated because he had just realised that, last week, across his sales team, 20 appointment slots had gone unfilled, due either to cancellations or a failure to schedule appointments. He had calculated that these […]
When I insist that Sales Coordinators — and never Salespeople — should make follow-up calls, there’s always a howl of protest from Salespeople. “What about the relationship?” is the instinctive response, followed by, “but Sales Coordinators don’t have technical skills — or sales skills”. Of course we can immediately discount the instinctive response (Executives have PA’s […]
I guess I don’t really mind that people generally regard me as being opposed to salesperson autonomy (and, of course, performance pay). Antagonism is certainly more newsworthy than conformity! However, my position is not quite this simple, and a deeper understanding of the basic principle at stake here is more useful than the sound bite. […]
I was impressed to see Gordon Ramsay explain TOC basics to a failing restaurateur in his new reality show “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” the other night. Ramsay is the gruff, Scottish, Michelin-star-winning, celebrity chef. His show tracks his attempts to knock poor-performing restaurants into shape with his unique mix of screamed expletives, gentle reasoning and some […]
Here’s a potentially lethal sales process engineering error that we’ve made a number of times; and one that many of our subscribers have made — and are making right now — too! The error is to attempt to increase opportunity flow to match your salesperson capacity. (It sounds innocuous enough but, like I said, it’s […]
About once a day, I feel compelled to scream at no one in particular: ‘it’s all about scheduling!’ Because it is. All about scheduling, that is. The Ballistix method — Sales Process Engineering — it’s really all about scheduling. But people just don’t get it. So, I’m going to take some time out to talk […]
Often, when we work with organisations that sell technical products (especially in a make-to-order environment), we find that salespeople are technical experts. When you add the requirement for technical expertise into the normal (massively-multitasked) sales environment you inevitably find that salespeople are hard to find and difficult to train. Furthermore, the consequences of salespeople defecting […]
There’s a simple reason why it’s all but impossible to extricate salespeople from the production process (particularly in a make-to-order environment). And there’s a simple solution to this problem. But it requires that we challenge a strongly-held assumption. So why do salespeople end up in production in the first place? Well, the salesperson takes a […]
It’s a mistake to assume (as some do) that our method is only appropriate to large business. I think the reason some assume this is that our method inevitably involves the employment of sales support personnel. The easy (but unhelpful) answer to this concern is to point out that if you can’t afford to have […]
