Sales Process Engineering Explained by Justin Roff-Marsh

Guest post by Justin Roff Marsh founder of Ballistix and the man behind Sales Process Engineering:

Imagine this — Your sales team is 20% of its current size. You have one or two experienced salespeople, each performing 4 true business-development meetings a day, five days a week (ten times their current activity volume).
Each salesperson has a capable executive assistant who plans his or her calendar — and who micro- manages each sales opportunity. All activities that do not absolutely have to be performed in the field have been transferred either to the salesperson’s executive assistant or routed (via the assistant) to inside sales or customer service. Solution design and any other technical sales activities are performed by a dedicated sales engineer — whose sole purpose is to ensure tight integration between sales and production.

It’s not hard to see that, in this new, reengineered, sales environment:

1. Activity is up (although the sales team is 20% of its current size, the remaining salespeople are, in aggregate, performing twice the volume of sales meetings)

2. Sales are up (in this new environment, all opportunities receive the attention of your best two salespeople — and the integrity of the opportunity-management process is the primary responsibility of each salesperson’s executive assistant)

3. Customer service is up (the responsibility for customer service has been transferred fully to the customer-service team; additionally, sales engineers exist solely to eliminate friction between sales and production)

4. Costs are down (sure, you’ve added a couple of new roles — but the decrease in the size of the sales team will more than offset these additional costs)

The reality of sales process today:

The term sales process is used freely within most organizations. The reality, however, is that most sales functions do not resemble processes. If you reflect on a typical process elsewhere in the organization, you’ll recognize that the most fundamental pre-requisites for process are absent from the sales environment:

1. A standard workflow
2. Division of labor (specialization)
3. Centralized workflow management

In most sales environments there is no process (in a formal sense of the word). Most are structured as industry used to be prior to the dawn of the industrial revolution.

Sales Process Engineering

Both this image of a reengineered sales environment and the method for transitioning there are the product of, what we call, Sales Process Engineering (SPE). SPE involves the application of process-engineering principles to the sales environment. A typical sales environment today, resembles production as it was 100 years ago! It is possible to multiply the performance of this sales environment by applying modern production principles
— most notably, division of labor and centralized scheduling.

To learn more about SPE, you should:

1. Subscribe to our resource library and download our whitepapers (and other resources) here: www.ballistix.com

2. Explore Justin Roff-Marsh’s blog (Justin is the developer of SPE and founder of Ballistix): www.salesprocessengineering.net

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