Sales Process Implementation

During the implementation of any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Sales Force Automation (SFA) software system, it is important to consider the sales process you employ within your sales team.

Implementing sales process within your organisation can at first seem a daunting task. Whilst many departments have undergone cost analysis and the reduction of non value added actions, sales have been left largely alone.

This is an historical situation. Whilst industry has undergone Total quality, Lean manufacture, Just in time and many more cost reduction exercises in the last 40 years, sales has been driven by increases in revenue. Paradoxically, the sales department has been the one department that has been the easiest to measure, if only with crude revenue and profit benchmarks. What would have been the improvements in the rest of manufacturing if revenue and margin were the only indicators?

The time is now right to look at benchmark practices within the sales department. There are many ratio’s we can measure within our sales and marketing departments. If the measurement of your marketing and territory management process, is the call to quote ratio of your sales people. Then the strike rate (quote to order) is the measurement of the sales people’s effectiveness in front of the customer or prospect.

In this way it is easier to implement many key ratios. Average order value, Forecast accuracy, no of sales calls etc. This type of data allows us to predict the year end estimate of each sales person as well as the whole sales department. If we could measure the quote turnaround times as well as the number of quotes raised by the sales person or the back office, it would be easy to implement real structure into the sales department.

Intelligent sales solutions have been developing sales processes for over 5 years. All aspects of this process can be measured and the future performance of each individual sales person predicted. Combine this process implementation with a management statistics package any you now have the tools that manufacturing and logistics have been using for 40 years.

It is possible to increase customer satisfaction and sales performance by up to 25% within 12 months. And it is all measurable.

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