Focus on value and eliminate waste in the process. That resonates with most of us. The more difficult question is how to do this in practice.

Let’s start with value, the hero in our story. I claim there are two types of ‘value’ associated with B2B sales process. The first one is obvious, value is in the output. Winning a deal is valuable for both the seller and the buyer, both get what they want (hopefully also what they need). The second ‘value’ element is process value. This is more difficult to identify as the value is created through out the process and often not documented. You can always go back to your customer to ask how much industry knowledge or best practices did they learn during the sales process, did the sales process (meetings, materials, etc) help the customer structure their issues and priorities differently or was the seller even able to convince customer to change their priorities during the process. These are difficult to quantify but the process value is there.

The villain of the story is waste. Lean defines seven categories of waste. Everything that does not help or benefit the customer is waste. In sales, one can also identify seven categories of waste (just like in manufacturing and production processes). Seven wastes in sales are as follows:

1. Partially done work
2. Degree of customisation
3. Re-learning
4. Handoffs
5. Delays
6. Task switching
7. Defects

I am sure all of us can relate to some of these on the top of our heads. The more interesting discussion is around how to create capabilities than can help the whole organisation to focus on value and eliminate waste in sales process. We’ve all seen sales people running after wrong opportunities, right? We’ve all seen customers desperately wanting customisations that are expensive to build? And so on.

Application of Lean principles in Sales does yield measurable results. Lean principles, focusing on value and eliminating waste, are very simple concepts. They make sense both in manufacturing as well as in sales and marketing, but do require some adjustments to fit sales process and sales management practices. Lean Sales is about creating more results with less selling.

Does your sales process identify value and waste?

Do your sales people eliminate waste out of sales process? Early?

Is the hero in our story value or the capability to identify and separate value and waste?

Take a look at my latest book on Amazon.com (titled Lean Sales) for end to end sales management methodology based on Lean principles and 20 case studies of implementation. Join the Lean Sales movement.

I am very interested to hear learnings and experiences from other companies applying Lean in sales.