The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function by Justin Roff-Marsh

Author:Justin Roff-Marsh
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Forecasting, Customer Relationship Management, Eli Goldratt, Sales Force Optimization, The Death of Field Sales, Theory of Constraints, Sales Management, Performance Pay, Channel Management, The Machine, Sales Process Improvement, Commission, TOC, Justin Roff-Marsh, Sales Process Engineering, SPE, CRM
Publisher: Ballistix USA
Published: 2015-10-19T14:00:00+00:00

At first glance, this model looks a little more complicated than the diagrams we encountered in part 1, but if you look a little closer, you’ll realize that what we’re dealing with here is the inside-out model, just with a little more detail.

PolyArts included their design team because either drawings or prototypes are required for most packaging proposals. They adjusted the number of circles to represent the number of people they have in each role, and they added little queues of works in progress to indicate the key metrics they intended to monitor.

A diagram like this is very valuable, for a couple of reasons. First, the best way to plan a change like this is to have your team create a model in this form; and second, it’s a great communication tool: You’ll find that your existing team members will understand a diagram like figure 30 at a glance.

Creating Your Model

The best way to arrive at a model like that of PolyArts is to follow the process described in chapter 4. In other words, start inside and work outward. For this discussion, we’ll assume you’re adopting the inside-out model.

Customer Service

Specifically, start with a blank sheet of paper and add a number of circles to represent your customer service team.

Now, here’s a warning! This process will be very painful and unproductive if you are considering your team members at the same time that you are formulating a design for your new model. You need to forget about your existing team members for the moment. I often counsel executives to pretend that their entire sales and customer service team has gone missing for some unimaginable reason and that they must rebuild this function from scratch.

Ultimately, it’ll be easier to convince your team members to get behind a model that looks like it will work than it will to excite them with the sorry result of compromise and equivocation (even if the new model requires that they make uncomfortable changes).

You should add enough customer service representatives to cope with your existing volume of orders, quote requests, and issues—even if your salespeople are currently responsible for some (or all) of these activities.

This, of course, is because soon enough they will not be.

You should also ensure that your customer service team is large enough to provide you with sufficient protective capacity. You need this for a few reasons:

Customer service tasks need to be processed quickly. Orders should be entered within minutes of their receipt, and quote requests and issues should be processed within single-digit hours (not days!). Believe me, your customers will reward you for this—with more orders.

The inbound flow of work is quite variable. You need to resource for times of peak load, not for your average load.

Your capacity is even more variable. For example, if you have a team of five customer service representatives (CSRs) and one has a day off, you have just lost 20 percent of your capacity. It’s quite likely that you can’t afford for your lead-times to blow out by a commensurate amount.

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