Sales Process Engineering Bootcamp

In two fast-paced days we will accomplish what most consultants fail to deliver in months.

Between us, we’ll produce a plan to reengineer your sales process that is comprehensive, practical and ingenious — guaranteed.

Yes, that’s guaranteed! If, within seven days of the Bootcamp, you feel that the plan you created fails on any of these three counts (comprehensive, practical, ingenious) we’ll refund your investment in full; no questions asked.

By comprehensive, I mean that your plan will cover all facets of your sales process; from promotion to opportunity management; from resourcing to key performance indicators; and from technology to collateral materials.

By practical, I mean that your plan can be applied in the real world, in a reasonable period of time, and with a realistic expectation it will deliver positive, tangible benefits.

And, by ingenious, I mean that this plan will not consist of a bunch of tired old platitudes (work your people harder, downsize, raise prices, take more measurements). This plan will be the product of some serious thinking, some strenuous debate and the sacrifice of the odd sacred cow!

As well as consuming less time that a typical consultant’s study, the SPE Bootcamp will cost a fraction of a consultant’s fee. (You can purchase two tickets for $2,170.)

Sales Process Engineering

The premise underpinning our approach to the sales process is very simple:

Salespeople are the sales process’s most scarce (valuable) resource, so salespeople’s time should be allocated to activities that generate the greatest possible yield.

In most organisations, salespeople allocate only a small percentage of their time to the highest-yielding activities (negotiating transactions). The greater majority of their time is allocated to prospecting, clerical activities, account management and project management.

Our approach reconfigures the sales process to ensure that salespeople focus only on those activities that generate the maximum yield on their finite time availability. Typically, this results in salespeople doing nothing other than business-development appointments. Business-development appointments are appointments where the explicit objective is the generation of new business from either potential or current clients.

The result, in a typical environment, is that the number of business development appointments conducted by a typical salesperson increases from 2 a week to 20 a week. An order of magnitude improvement!

Our challenge, in achieving this, is to transfer low-yielding activities elsewhere.

To do this, we apply process engineering principles to the sales process:

1. Standardisation. We standardise the sales process as a whole, but particularly the opportunity-management process.
2. Division of labour. We distribute those low-yielding tasks previously performed by the salesperson across a team of specialists (a sales support team).
3. Automation. We automate repetitive tasks (this particularly applies to the promotional function).
4. Scheduling. We apply a formal approach to the scheduling of activities to ensure that:
   1. The salesperson’s time is always applied to the activities likely to produce the very highest return.
   2. All other activities are tightly synchronised so as to maintain the integrity of opportunity-, project- and account-management processes.

As a consequence of this scientific approach to the sales process, we typically find that the integrity of core processes is dramatically improved, resulting in a faster flow of sales opportunities and an improvement in quality (conversion rate).

The small business implications of SPE

In the case of a small business, SPE assumes even more relevance. This is because sales resources are even scarcer than they are likely to be in a larger enterprise.

In most small businesses it makes sense for the salesperson to be an owner or a senior manager. Of course, in such a situation, the salesperson has even more demands on his or her time than a traditional salesperson.

The danger is that this senior person will be distracted from sales by operational responsibilities — resulting in a boom and bust bottom line.

The solution is to engineer the sales environment to ensure that this senior person performs a fixed number of business-development appointments each and every week (irrespective of operational demands). In the first instance, the senior person might perform as few as five appointments a week — however, if this commitment is maintained, it will not be long until the enterprise grows to the point where the number can be increased.

The SPE Bootcamp

The SPE Bootcamp consists of a two-day workshop, facilitated by myself, and attended by a small group of business owners and senior managers.

The SPE Bootcamp is designed to answer the three most critical questions you are likely to have about Sales Process Engineering:

1. What will the end-state be (how should your sales process be designed, resourced and managed)?
2. How will we get there (how should our reengineering project be structured)?
3. What will the financial impact be (cash flow and payback time)?
Let’s first consider the process we follow to answer these questions, and then, the issues we canvass. We’ll then turn our attention to the format of the Bootcamp.

Process

Over the course of the two-day Bootcamp, we will 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 workflows, technology, measurements, promotional activities, etc)
4. Design the process required to transition your organisation from its current to its future reality (a high-level project outline)
5. Determine the financial impact of the proposed project by considering its incremental impact on:
   1. Throughput (the flow of gross profit through your organisation)
   2. Investment (both capital expenditure and promotional dollars)
   3. Operating expenses (all those costs that aren’t directly linked to throughput)

Considerations

In the deliberations discussed above, we consider the following issues:

1. Organisational strategy
2. Opportunity management process
3. Promotional process (including offers and campaigns)
4. Customer service process
5. Integration of processes above with operations
6. Human resource requirements (salespeople and support personnel)
7. Process management and metrics (how do you synchronise activities within — and between — processes?)
8. Technology (CRM database and management information)
9. Communication collateral
10. Potential change-management issues

Method

The SPE Bootcamp is definitely a hands-on workshop (and not a series of lectures). Over the course of the two days we’ll work through each step of the process described above and we’ll each create a set of notes and drawings on our notebook computers (using a combination of Visio and Excel).

As your facilitator, I’ll generalise from the experiences of delegates to create a master set of notes and drawings (projected onto a screen for everyone to see). I’ll also provide individual assistance to you or your team.

Although it will be possible to participate in this Bootcamp without a notebook computer, you will find it much easier to work with Visio and Excel than you will with graph paper and a calculator.

You can download a trial version of Visio from Microsoft prior to the event. If you choose not to register it subsequently, it will continue to operate in Reduced Functionality mode — which will still allow you to view the documents you created in the Bootcamp.

Who should attend?

You’ll have already noticed that the fee for subsequent delegates is significantly less than it is for the primary delegate. This is to encourage you to bring those senior team members with you whose buy-in will determine your ultimate success.

You should not bring salespeople unless you have canvassed Sales Process Engineering (and its likely implications) with them in advance.

Moving forward

We are confident that Sales Process Engineering Bootcamp will provide a plan to reengineer your sales process, multiply your revenues, and accelerate the growth of your business — so confident, in fact, that we’re prepared to guarantee it.

If you are comfortable that this is the appropriate time in the evolution of your firm to pay serious attention to your sales process, then you should reserve tickets now.

Book now!

View some speaker highlights

Intro to SPE		Qualification		4 appts a day

Other downloads

Audio interview:
Reengineering the Sales Process

Multimedia presentation:
Reengineering the Sales Process