Sales Laundry

Several years ago, on one of my account calls I got an opportunity to tour the Kansas City General Motors plant. Trains brought raw steel in one end of the plant and through a maze of conveyors, yellow robots, and factory workers 95 new cars an hour rolled out the other end.

To me there are a lot of similarities between a manufacturing facility and a sales organization. Just like an assembly line, sales is a process that takes time to ramp up, to develop skills, time to develop relationships, and time to begin to deliver forecasted business.

From a standing start it can be painful to get sales teams in place and productive, but once the momentum turns in your favor a seasoned sales team can be a revenue generating fire hose. Just point, hang on, and let err rip!

For every management team out there with a sales cycle of any length, look at your sales team as a manufacturing facility and each rep as a little sales factory.

Sales factories do not need typically need much in the way of resources to be successful, but with some attention in some key areas, efficiency can be dramatically increased.

1. Sales needs raw materials in the form of leads. You can ask the sales factories to generate their own leads but understand that time unloading the train cars means less time being spent sending products out the door.

2. Tie marketing resources directly to sales efforts. Build email, direct mail, web, client testimonial videos and any other form of make sense marketing that will help the sales factories churn out revenue. The key here is to make sure the marketing message and the message the sales team is sending is at the very least the same and hopefully wildly complimentary of one another.

It would be a mistake to think of every marketing dollar spent as a dollar wasted. Marketing and advertising expenses, in some instances, can be directly offset by a reduction in the real cost of acquiring a new client by the sales department.

3. Analyze the activities of your sales team. Identify the non/low revenue generating activities that can be eliminated, ones that can be retasked to a more cost effective sales resource, or automated altogether.

For example, in one sales organization I noticed we were spending $27 on every email being sent by one particular rep.

Each email was extensively thought out with key phrases chosen beautifully but it was taking him over 30 minutes to craft each unique email.

Taking a step back and looking across the entire team, I found we were massively duplicating our efforts crafting emails. The messages were unique to the rep writing them, off message, and collectively eating 20% of almost every sales day, touching a painfully small portion of the market base.

The solution was to look at our outgoing emails, evaluate what the team was spending 80% of their time trying to communicate and crafting a variety of templates that were on message, could be personalized, and met with the approval of the sales team. Simple stuff, but that move effectively added half a sales rep to the team in terms of time and sales for nothing.

Look at your sales organization like it is an assembly line; make sure that internal processes and or inadvertent obstacles are not impacting your sales team’s acquisition of leads or the sales they are cranking out.

The last and most important thing I can say is do not do this in a vacuum.

Engage your sales team, solicit their feedback. Effective ways to get more sales are in their best interest as well.