In 4 weeks you will find your sales team finally selling. We make your sales team produce contracts and sales orders in a way your shop floor does with inventory. Productivity boost is caused by application of division of labour with complete subordination to the sales process constraint.
To keep constantly closing the deals, we provide continuous stream of new sales opportunities, fulfil field salespeople time-slots with face-to-face meetings and daily (yes, daily!) conduct stand-up meetings to sync all commitments and execution within your sales team.
We enable 5 Focusing Steps to become a common practice of improving the Sales Factory on continuous basis. Sales flow data alerts undesirable effects while Thinking Processes and Throughput Accounting decision making allow to overcome almost any obstacle.
In sales, as in any other system, the output is determined by the performance of the weakest link, or the constraint. The key to achieving growth for organization with excess capacity is finding a way to focus MANAGEMENT ATTENTION, organization’s scarcest resource, on only only that part of sales system that is currently limiting your business development.
The Sales Factory provides a practical holistic mechanism, real-time reporting & analytics and thinking processes to help you differentiate between all the parts that can be improved and those few that must be improved to achieve more sales & profits in less time.
At the Sales Factory, the essence of the sales function – the TRANSFORMATION of opportunities to contracts or orders – is reflected in the flow centric view. Once sales flow is managed, the focus is defined by the constraint, the exploitation plan and the subordination rules.
We design sales process in a such way that they’re minimizing the deviations and resistance of sales people to the change. In most manufacturing companies, along with specific processes, there’re 3 typical sales processes: lead-to-contract, RFQ-to-order, upselling. Each sales process is a repetitive collection of known in advance interrelated tasks, with known sequence, and predictable output aimed to achieve a certain goal.
The job of the scheduling function is to synchronise the rate of work of the various resources within the sales processes. Based on a sales process constraint load to capacity it sends signals to the process backlog to either release new leads to the process or chock the release.
Once division of labour (specialization) is applied within your sales team, salespeople will perform the roles that are defined and assigned to them to accomplish appropriate stage of a specific sales process. By this injection, active selling capacity of the same size sales team is always boosted by 2-4 times.
While new sales cycle takes months on average, salespeople often fail to keep internal and external commitments that sometime result in losing the deal. In order to shorten the sales cycle and improve hit ratio, our Customer Success Managers conduct daily stand-ups with your salespeople to control Work In Process and expedite opportunities under delay.
Segmenting the markets according to customer perception of value is the key to achieving high profit goals. Each segment has a different set of customer major needs that are later addressed when executing the sales process. Segmentation provides criteria for lead collection and replenishment.
Our back-office team makes sure that the sales process never runs out of stock leads. You know what happens with the production flow when materials or components are missing, or they're of low quality - without high quality leads the sales flow is damaged likewise.
Not having a detailed sales process may lead to skipping the necessary stage or complete it too late, complete wrong next stage or do not pay required attention to the customer which typically results in losing the deal. We've huge experience in standardising even most complex processes so they were managed simply.
Since people behave in the way they're measured, we pay high attention to the incentive systems we find at our customer sales teams and initiate to change them if they prevent to drive the team towards company goal. Our experience shows any incentives have positive impact on salespeople productivity if and only if people are qualified, have necessary tools and if their responsibility and authority are aligned.
Our Business Development Coordinator (BDC) team's working on behalf of your company job is to make sure that every available field sales appointment slot is filled with face-to-face sales meetings. Imagine a never ending queue of potential customers waiting to meet with your sales reps - it is exactly what you get once off-load your sales team and outsource meeting scheduling to TOC Sales and Marketing, UAB.
CRM system is indispensable to manage the sales flow. If your current CRM software can be improved by adding some extra TOC/Lean functionality and algorithms, then no change of current system is required. In other cases we quickly setup a SaaS platform to run your Sales Factory the TOC way. IT system must be configured to focus Management Attention upon the slow moving opportunities with high Throughput, quickly spot unfulfilled commitments (for daily stand-ups to be effective), and significantly reduce salespeople time on data entry.
A dedicated Customer Success Manager will conduct daily (every day throughout the year!) stand-ups with your salespeople to sync information among different roles in the process, verify the execution of promises given to the customers, control Work In Process and expedite opportunities under delay. Your sales manager has never led such routine meetings and never will, due to his/her busyness.
Our marketing team will take care of any marketing material used within the sales process: websites, email templates, phone scripts, company introductions, face-to-face meeting presentations, customer references.
It's a TOC marketing solution, described by Dr. Goldratt as 'an offer they can’t refuse'. An offer so good that your customers can’t refuse it and your competition can’t or won’t offer the same. Series of workshops are conducted to construct, test and present such an offer targeted for a specific market segment.
We will train your salespeople responsible for creating quotes to make price calculations according to Throughput Accounting rules, not Cost Accounting. This change is extremely important when the proportion of opportunities lost due to too high price is growing while there's excess production capacity in your company.
We apply Business Intelligence technology to automate and visualise real time reports based on data retrieved from the CRM. Your salespeople will never waste their selling capacity anymore by collecting and analysing the data of their own performance while the management will be able to make much precise decisions based on accurate and fresh data.
We apply TOC’s five focusing steps to analyze and improve our customer's sales function holistically. Improvements are addressed to the sales processes, target segmentation (customers), competency of the salespeople to execute the sales processes, and offer (product/solution). All improvements and achievements are documented. We believe, the bigger the base, the bigger the jump, therefore always encourage our customers to increase the targets and pay management attention on improvement not when something fails, but rather when targets are met.
We involve your top management team to make periodical decisions on product mix, pricing and capacity using Throughput Economics software. They are encouraged to check many additional sales & marketing ideas, based on their intuition and knowledge, like promotions, bundles, or just negotiation position, including some that look risky until they are properly checked. We set a decision making routine to process various “what-if” scenarios in seconds and come up with ∆T-∆OE and ∆I calculations and so immediately simulate bottom line results. This builds trust and understanding among Sales, Operations and Finance who now verify together how sales & marketing ideas might affect profitability and load of available production capacity.
price excludes VAT
Sales Factory implementation
CRM implementation or upgrade
Lead replenishment
Scheduling face-to-face meetings
Weekly product mix meetings
Daily stand-ups
Real time reporting
Ongoing improvement
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.
On average, salespeople spend just 11% of their time actively selling to customers (Alexander Proudfoot survey).
Let’s do a quick check. How would you answer this question? If I could increase your sales tomorrow by 20 percent, could you handle the increase while:
If the only way that you could handle the increase is to increase your lead times, work overtime, or miss due dates, then you have an internal operational constraint. You don’t have a market constraint.
On the other hand, if you can answer yes and you could take a 20 percent increase in sales and not have any negative effects, then you do have a market or sales process constraint.
Lang, L. (2010). Mafia Offers: dealing with a market constraint. Theory of Constraints Handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill, 603-628.