Sales Standardization

What does this have to do with Selling?

Although a lot believe that sales success depends on salespeople’s guts, and is merely an art, which could not be much taught or standardized. Still and after the success of Lean Six Sigma on optimizing the process within manufacturing, production, as well as many other internal processes, a lot of research was done, especially from veterans that believe salespeople could be made (and not born), to check the validity and application of Lean Six Sigma on Sales and Selling.

I personally heard about this in the early 2000s, but to me, back then, as a salesperson proud of my tactics and personal touches in getting sales into success, I thought of Lean Six Sigma as a reasonable concept, but not applicable in the real world. Until I read a detailed case study on Mark Roberge, VP of Sales @ Hubspot. He who came from non sales or sales management background experience, made a very successful world-class sales organization placing his company on #33 Fastest Growing Company in America on the Inc. 500 List, by putting in place well designed standards, systems and governance and applying science into sales.

Thus I decided to venture into this and started by the end of 2010, with a group of other consultants a detailed research, study and development to craft a well structured methodology of which we are proud today that it has proven success in a lot of companies, from small and medium to even enterprise companies.

What We Do

We rely fully on our joint expertise as savvy salespeople along our engineering background and best practices to create a system, focusing our efforts on building a sales organization with governance and standardization in place applying Lean Six Sigma on all levels and processes within the sales organization from aligning, hiring, developing, retaining and performing.

We build governance and systems that rely on metrics and quantitative analysis:

1. Align the salespeople efforts: Even with the right skills, incentives, resources and action plan, the business can lead to confusion without clear direction. Thus we are here to design a framework that will assure to put your sales force efforts in the right direction. It will clearly share a unity of direction to the salespeople: which customers to target best, which products to focus on most, and how to properly position themselves along their responsibilities, expectations,  job roles and targets.

2. Hire the same successful salesperson every time: Most companies screen sales candidates on “gut feel,” which does not scale. Our aim is to inject quantitative analysis into this normal unscientific process. Thus we draw up a list of twelve criterion that we believe, based on our research and experience, will correlate with the success in the sales role. Then we give each criteria a weight according to relative importance within each industry — on a scale of 1 to 10. To finally run a regression analysis, correlating the interview scores to success in our sales funnel.

3. Train the people in a consistent and measurable way: Research shows that 74% of all salespeople are overwhelmingly mediocre, and as such, they succeed in closing non-challenging sales deals. 60% out of this number could reach a higher performance when trained properly. We at HEED along with our 2nd arm “The Science of Sales Institute” an accredited body from the top sales institute “ISM – Institute of Sales Management of London”, will design, build, and run a measurable consistent sales program aligned with your overall messages and organization strategy.

4. Standardize the way salespeople interact and communicate with clients: Studies have indicated that there is an 18% difference in revenue growth between companies that have defined a formal sales process and companies that haven’t. According to Harvard Business Review article on “the New Role of Rainmakers”, applying science when selling produces a 200% increase in productivity even when rainmakers are in their bad quarters. In fact, it has been proven that those same top salespeople who finish their deals successfully with their innate talent and skills; unconsciously follow a specific client centric track for achievements. They are not aware that they are actually behind a successful virtual sales mapped process. For More details – Refer to Mapping a Client Centric Sales Process

5. Set a constant quality and quantity of the salespeople’s activities: Instead of focusing on the sales targets only, we create a culture of milestones that help salespeople to focus on better understanding their funnel and its leading KPI’s. As an example, we keep the sales team aligned in continuously generating the same number of leads, conduct the same quantity and quality of calls, maintain a fixed number of new meetings per week, and have same healthy pipeline & funnel form.

6. Design governance and a systematic reporting measurable framework: You can not manage what you can not measure. This is why a proper scientific foundation, along with a unified way of reporting and user adoption for people is crucial. This is where HEED takes ownership in pulling the strings to link strategy, processes, plans and people together.

How does this Impact your Business

Studies have revealed a direct and an indirect impact in the very short future of applying this process into any organization. Further it brought visibility into perspective in order to better steer the sales organization in tough economic days. Our case studies have proven that such practice led to a direct increase in sales ~22% within 1-2 years of being implemented.

Knowing the difficulty of hiring stars members, if you are looking to bridge the gap between top performers and average salespeople, and thus resulting with at least 10% revenue growth within a six to seven month engagement – take the first step in this process by contacting us on any of our below coordinates to discuss your sales challenges.

We take full ownership in getting your solution well crafted by combining our sales specialty, proven frameworks, best practices, and data-driven insights. The entire process is executed through our scientific and pragmatic approach while linking together strategies, processes, people, and technology.