The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function

by Justin Roff-Marsh

Now that we agree on what sales opportunities are, we can discuss how to prosecute them—how to convert a percentage of them into sales. For each opportunity type (sales objective), we need a standard workflow. A workflow is the sequence of steps that need to be performed in order to convert a potential customer into an actual one.

You should have only one workflow for each product or service. In fact, similar products should share the same workflow. If you receive opportunities from multiple promotional campaigns, those campaigns should all be designed to feed into the same workflow.

The best way to understand the opportunity-management workflow is to build or map one. To make this exercise challenging, we’ll map a business-development workflow

After the workshop, the project leader should convert the outcomes into a formal presentation of findings document and review this document with the salesperson prior to the scheduled presentation of findings meeting. My preference is to create this document in PowerPoint or in a similar format. The format forces the project leader to reduce their findings to essentials—and it also allows the same document to be used as a presentation aid.

Accounts are underexploited because salespeople are too busy with customer service (including the processing of repeat transactions) to dedicate much attention to business development, and opportunities are underexploited because salespeople insist on engaging only with qualified opportunities.

this reason, it’s likely that you will be able to generate all the opportunities you need to at least double your current volume of sales activities (field meaningful selling interactions) simply by pitching new service lines to existing accounts (rather than simply processing repeat transactions) and engaging with all existing accounts more frequently—particularly those that are not already heavy users of your services—and by eliminating qualification and engaging with everyone who is a genuine prospect (capacity permitting).

A prospect is either an individual or an organization that has a nonzero likelihood of purchasing within a reasonable time horizon.

We use the word campaign to refer to both the communication and the cohort of prospects who are being communicated with.

You may have noticed that the only concept here that implies a value judgment is prospect. A sales opportunity is simply the raw material that a salesperson works on. Promotion is simply the process of finding and queuing that raw material. And a campaign is simply a cohort of prospects (and the communication we have with that cohort).

Campaigns have multiple steps for the same reason opportunities do—namely, it is often unrealistic (or uneconomic) to pitch the ultimate objective at the first point of contact with the market.

In an AB test, you simply test two (or more) variations of the campaign to determine which performs better. The real magic is not the test itself, but rather the iterative framework that encapsulates the test:

Your campaign coordinator should create and save a filter (or view) in your customer relationship management (CRM) application that contains a list of all contacts that are eligible for this campaign (in this case, all primary contacts associated with active accounts).

In this case, we’ll reach out to those opportunities that said no to you recently and see whether we can get them to reconsider. This campaign is interesting because it provides us with an excuse to grapple with the concept of discounting.

You’ll likely discover that a small percentage of lost opportunities can be reactivated—and subsequently sold—if you are prepared to make a small concession (a better price or some other benefit with purchase). And this incremental sales lift can have an outsized impact on your profitability over time.

Here are the dangers we’ve been warned about: Discounting reduces your profitability, and the revenue increase required to recover that lost profitability is the inverse of the discount; discounting trains customers to alter their behavior so that they can consistently purchase at lower prices; and discounting triggers a price war—leading to a race to the bottom.

attached. In other words, I’m suggesting that you should never offer a discount without imposing a condition or two. If you ensure that your discounts always have strings attached, you should be able to prevent your competitors (and your customers) from converting a one-off offer into a general price reduction.

Here are some examples of the kind of conditions you should attach to discounts (or benefits with purchase): • It should be valid only for first-time purchases of particular service lines. • It should be valid only if delivery is between certain dates (to take advantage of a temporary hole in your production schedule). • It should be valid only if the customer allows six weeks for delivery.

I hope you’ve noticed that all the campaigns thus far have been directed at your existing house list (accounts and prospects). It’s critical that you exploit the value in your existing list before you invest money in the acquisition of new prospects in the cold market.

One way to discipline yourself to write interesting copy is to start with the least self-serving (working) title you can possibly imagine. For example, if you are ultimately selling accounting software, you might commence with the following: The Top Ten Reasons the Best Accounting Package is the One You Already Own.

You’ll almost certainly find that fifteen pages of copy begging readers not to waste money on unnecessary software will do a better job of selling your application than a hundred pages of standard marketing prose—assuming, of course, that your product services a legitimate need!

Now that you have your e-book, the next step is to give it away. This requires two creative elements: an advertisement (to grab people’s attention) and a landing page (to capture visitors’ contact details). There are numerous places you can run advertisements—everywhere from your local cinema (which is not a great idea) to The New York Times (which can be a great idea, once you know for sure you have a winning campaign on your hands).

Cold calling is dead.

You now know how to generate and manage sales opportunities—the lifeblood of your reengineered sales function. Like the circulatory system, opportunity flow is necessary but not sufficient. There are other processes required to keep the organism alive and healthy. The last two chapters tackle two of them: technology and management.

Most managers are excited by technology. Technology enables us to get more done, faster. And technology is practical, concrete. It’s not about ideas; it’s about execution.

The CRM is a subset of a larger class of software, known as enterprise resource planning (ERP). ERP is the software that manages operational workflows in the organization as a whole. Things such as order generation, production environment scheduling, inventory management, payables and receivables processing, and so on.

As we’ll shortly discover, the CRM has the potential to unleash enormous productivity improvements in sales environments. The problem with this technology is that it has been designed around the requirements of a sales environment that doesn’t actually exist. It’s useful (and somewhat amusing) to understand why this has occurred.

The CRM can assist with both of these conditions. Because the heart of the CRM is a giant database, the sharing of data is easy, but the CRM also makes it possible for you to provide different people in your organization—and even people in your client’s organization—with custom views of the central data set.

In practice, managers tend to be responsible for more than just the internal synchronization of their functions. They are also responsible for maintaining the integrity of their domains, which translates into practical activities such as hiring and firing, controlling expenses, ensuring procedural compliance, and so on, and they are responsible for managing the interface between their functions and other organizational functions.

Effective sales management starts with a decision to manage—in the true sense of the word—and this, for many managers and executives, is the toughest decision of all. In the inside-out model, the manager must shoulder a number of responsibilities that have traditionally been delegated to salespeople.