Bringing lean to your sales team
One of the most challenging departments in which to implement lean is sales. But these challenges must be worked through, because sales is a department with processes, workflows and customer insights that are critical to creating an end-to-end lean organization. LEI faculty member Brent Wahba shares his experience introducing lean to sales departments.
A central part of a lean transformation is identifying and eliminating waste. What are some examples of waste that are unique to sales?
One of the most challenging aspects of sales work is that salespeople and managers have multiple roles within a large “system” or market. Sales has its own processes, such as prospecting, quoting, competitive analysis and order processing, in addition to supporting other internal value streams and becoming an integral part of a customer's value stream (the “buyer's journey”) so that the customer can travel the best path to satisfaction. Throughout each process, sales organizations have to create and improve the flow of useful information so that others can do their work. This requires a great deal of effort and complexity.
Because all these processes are interconnected, any waste the sales organization can avoid or eliminate is positively compounded to provide an even greater benefit to the overall system. For example, preparing a lot of sales collateral (brochures, e-mails, videos) not only takes a long time to create and produce, but also overburdens those who have to receive and process that information – even if only to delete or recycle it. Another example is overselling (overproduction) when there is not enough organizational capacity to design or deliver what was promised. This leads to problems internally and with customers.
So, obviously, the 7 (or 8 or 9) wastes apply to sales too, but there is another one that I think is rarely discussed: bad strategy. If we do not have a good, value-creating purpose and strategy, then we create waste for the whole organization, all our customers (who have to listen to us talk about our ineffective solutions), as well as all our investors and suppliers, because we are all heading in the wrong direction together. In many cases, this can be fatal.
So let us move on to the transformation itself. You have been making all the value streams lean, and now sales is next. What is the best way to let them know what is about to happen?
In most organizations, sales and marketing are usually the last departments invited to take part in a lean transformation, and that is bad, because their process improvements give other value streams greater capacity and a clearer definition of value from the customer's point of view. If sales is not aligned with operations, for example, we will struggle to meet customer delivery expectations and level workloads, and we will often miss great opportunities to increase profitability. Another problem with being “late to the lean party” is that most internal stories and external examples are in operations. For lean to succeed in sales, it has to be taught and understood in the context and terminology of sales – not of building Camrys and Corollas. A lean transformation is very difficult, and adding more complexity will not improve the success rate.
To counter these challenges, I like to start with simple questions, such as “what is keeping you from selling more?” or “what problems are your customers having?”. Once they understand that lean is really about learning to solve your own problems with your own solutions (and not about creating an army of dumb robots that speak Japanese), most salespeople come on board very quickly, because they recognize lean as a solution, and not just as a set of nice tasks to add to their overloaded lives. It helps to point out that many good salespeople are naturally lean, because they solve internal and customer problems, communicate efficiently, focus on the most promising targets and coach others to build better organizational capabilities. And finally, a number of well-known sales methodologies have strong links to lean, since they are efficiently managed processes with built-in learning and improvement cycles. Lean is not rocket science, so we just need to respect and engage sales professionals to leverage their own ideas, rather than have them blindly accept our thinking. Approaching it as if we were throwing some secret special knowledge at them will not encourage anyone – in fact, it will often have the opposite effect.
And once they are prepared for what is coming, what do you think is the best way to start the transformation? Visual management? Kanbans? 5S? Etc.?
Because there is so much complexity and variation (not to mention opportunity) in sales and management processes, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will be universally successful. Some organizations have succeeded with a “sales factory” approach (using many lean manufacturing concepts), while others have failed miserably with the same methods. The path to a successful lean transformation is therefore situational – regardless of which specific processes or organizations are being improved.
So, in sales, you do not know where to start until everyone looks at the organization's strategic objectives (what are our main long-term gaps?) and starts talking to the front-line salespeople, who meet with customers every day. Most companies do not have good sales feedback to take advantage of the deep internal customer insights that reps have. I worked with a company that, like everyone else, wanted to sell more. However, as we investigated their problems, we found that sales efficiency was far from their biggest issue. They were having trouble delivering products on time, and, as a result, their reps had become afraid to visit customers for fear of being scolded. They also had little high-level management coordination among business units, and this created a ton of waste for the reps, because constantly changing priorities and a broken compensation structure did not support alignment (or profit, for that matter). These may sound like complicated problems, but once they are identified, they really are not that hard to solve with the right cross-functional people in the room and a few simple problem-solving tools, such as A3 or value stream mapping.
The biggest goal of sales is (surprise) to sell more. Lean can certainly speed things up and reduce waste, but does that necessarily translate into increased sales?
Definitely! There are two main parts. First, if we better understand what customers value, we will develop better products, services and operational capabilities to deliver that value. This will naturally lead to more sales. In addition, within the sales process we will be providing more valuable information to those customers at the right time, in the right place, format and quantity to help them make better purchasing decisions, which (hopefully) include our most valuable offerings.
Second, only after we understand value can we understand waste, and therefore we can focus our efforts on the activities that really lead to more sales. Department store magnate John Wanamaker declared: “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half,” but I think he was extremely optimistic. I love those fun Super Bowl commercials as much as anyone, but the problem is that the vast majority do not lead to more sales or to better brand perception. There is enormous inefficiency in promotion and advertising, so we need to improve this science of buyer psychology along with our lean concepts, so that they really add value and do not just blindly streamline our waste.
