The Sales Factory brings major benefits for everyone in the sales team: less hated tasks, less reporting, less CRM data entry, less fire-fighting with production, less stress while more time for bringing new customers, more attention to existing customers, higher bottom line results. A transition from old-type sales function based on autonomous work of salespeople to the Sales Factory based on division of labour is carefully planned and executed resolving all negative ramifications of the salespeople. As Dr. Eli Goldratt said, people do not resist change, they judge it! Once patiently explained and well planned, the change to Sales Factory is often accepted with high expectations and deep involvement.

Any company must have excess capacity to keep growing. But in our experience we had a few customers who decided to stop selling (they terminated the Sales Factory service) after constraint moved from the market to the production that was not ready to satisfy quickly increased demand. Sure, in a short term it is better to reject sales orders instead of failing to deliver. But in a long term it is always hard to recapture lost customers afterwards. In the Sales Factory, potential sales are known in advance (so production has enough time to elevate the capacity, e.g. launch 2nd of 3rd shift) and sales promises are based on production load to capacity ratio. In case if production needs significant improvement we introduce our certified experts from TOC community who specialise in increasing throughput in manufacturing companies with internal constraint.

You should have noticed we don’t speak about particular figures of the increase of sales, haven’t you? It is because every company is uniquely affected by various sources of variability: supply, demand, management, operations, regulations. Nevertheless, we can predict the positive effect if (1) most of the symptoms are true (please see a generic Current Reality Tree) and (2) if we implement a set of managerial changes that brought desired results for other manufacturers with similar symptoms. When focused on the flow, it is only a matter of time (competence) and efforts (execution) when the flow is increased.

Sure it will! Handling part of your sales operations, upstream of face-to-face meetings, our back-office has direct impact on your sales flow. This creates a huge pressure for our team to perform very well. Every day! On the other hand, we do nothing that couldn’t be done by the company itself or replaced by your internal resources once the Sales Factory is implemented. You may terminate the service anytime with no prior notice and any compensations – this makes our team work so good you would never think of doing the same yourself. And yes, we never work with direct competitors of our customers.

That’s correct. You will see the progress in the flow or opportunities every day despite the length of the sales cycle. The transformation downstream the sales process is a necessary condition to get the result – win an opportunity. So we charge a fixed price for the permanent efforts our team puts to move your opportunities. When our companies cooperate longer than your sales cycle, real-time reports will start showing not only the progress of open opportunities in the Sales Factory but they will also count new contracts and sales orders. We work not for the result but rather for the system that continuously generates sales orders.

Well, we refuse working on project basis after a few attempts failed many years ago. Sales Factory does not operate on itself – it must be physically run. When we left the company before managing and executing sales flow became an organisational routine, it was only a matter of a few weeks for the Sales Factory to collapse. Was it built wrong? Or was it left without a required management attention from customer side on fulfilment of Sales Factory elements?

Under service agreement, you may terminate the contract at any time. But while planning the transition we show the customer negative branch (something bad that happens because of trying to do something good) and verbalise injections that MUST be implemented to make sure Sales Factory keeps generating sales orders after the “project” is over.

A proposed model of cooperation between yours and our companies does require to share information among everybody involved in the sales process. Working as a part of your sales function we will dispose data that is handled in your CRM system. To become a trusted partner we sign NDA with strict financial penalties defined, also we never work with your direct competitors. We fully support your policy not to share business sensitive information with untrustworthy people or organisations.

In the beginning of cooperation the expected results are often based on assumptions as we start under high uncertainty. As soon as we start executing the process we immediately see if our initial assumptions are correct and what injections or corrections are required to achieve initial target that might be missed if we continue working on wrong assumptions.

The sales cycle usually takes at least several months – much longer than parties tolerate to live without tangible results. We use advanced TOC algorithms to manage sales flow by receiving early warnings if the progress of opportunities is not sufficient and needs expedition.

Finally, if you’re not satisfied with the results, the progress and our efforts to react to the reality, you may terminate the contract at any time.