Lean Sales encourages organisations to think about how they manage sales (not only how they sell)

Many organisations have gone through a journey of sales performance improvement initiatives such as CRM implementation, sales training, sales competition, increasing activity levels, etc. Most of these organisations have also identified that traditional methods do not yield predictable or repeatable results. This is due to the fact that each of these methods focus only on one part of the system and lack systems thinking, holistic view to the whole sales system.

As sales people meet current and potential customers, they obviously need sales skills. But for an organisation to determine a) which customers to meet b) when to meet them c) select the topic for conversation d) set up the meeting there seems to be a lack of processes and practices to do this. Many organisations still rely on individual sales people with all these activities that are really not about selling.

Sales and selling is about “meaningful business development conversations” and about making proposals that help customer to go through their buying process. In there conversations one does need sales skills.

Selecting which customers to meet, when to meet them, scheduling meetings, setting up appointments and so on are not really ‘selling’. It is important and very valuable work, but not selling (meaningful business development conversations, negotiation or uncovering customer needs). Yet we tend to assign these tasks to sales people.

Lean Sales introduces design principles, which force organisations to re-think how sales work is being managed and how sales capacity is being utilised and allocated with the customers that matter the most and the best opportunities. Lean in Sales helps organisations to manage, guide and lead sales people.

First and foremost sales organisations need “sales scheduling system” (or approach or process) for allocating the sales capacity where it matters the most.

Every sales organisation must have a grip over its entire sales process. To get this done, the sales scheduling system must include tools and capabilities such as customer segmentation, customer selection criteria, lead generation and opportunity qualification. Customer segmentation helps organisations to select either the customers with biggest business potential or the customers with highest chance of winning (best fit with customer needs and the offering). Opportunity qualification helps organisations to make No Go decisions on individual opportunity basis. These are not something individual sales people “can do” on ad hoc basis but these are organisational capabilities any sales management system should have to systematically improve performance and do continuous improvement on.

In most sales organisations we find both very solid sales people as well as people that might be in wrong roles. But over and beyond that, we find that the sales management lacks scheduling system and capabilities to allocate sales capacity to the right customers and to the right sales opportunities. This causes sales organisations to create a lot of waste in terms of running after wrong customers and opportunities they will not win.

This is a great opportunity for many organisations and there are  case studies and examples to prove it.

Application of Lean thinking in sales helps organisations to manage sales better and improve the flow of sales opportunities throughout the funnel. Lean thinking is based on process thinking and the fact that all activities performed throughout the process produce either value or waste. Your sales people can still focus on selling and meaningful business development conversations.

But with the right customers and the right sales opportunities.