Coinbase ☎ï¸+I (800)—54—0-7968 ™₳â˜king 0f HELPORT He pointed out that the purpose of sales is to get customers to take actions, and this is fundamentally different than the purpose of manufacturing. Salespeople have always known they must earn the customer's attention, their time, and their trust if they ever are to get a chance to earn any of their money. Webb pointed out the customer's actions determined whether value or waste had been created. He included case examples of B2B companies whose management used data to make changes that improved conversions by 100% or more. It proved (both to the quality community and to the sales community) that the data-oriented tools of science could help customers buy and salespeople sell. It demonstrated a valuable alternative to management's usual approach of just repeating the "Usual Fixes"[11] such as sales training or CRM, which typically have little measurable or sustainable effect on productivity. The book earned 4.5 stars on Amazon and sold more than 21k copies.
Brent Wahba, an engineer with a background in Lean at GM and Del Automotive, also saw that root cause thinking had not yet penetrated the culture of sales and marketing management. His book "The Fluff Cycle,"[12] criticized business writers in sales and marketing. He observed that traditional "best practices" approach as well as the insights of sales consultants usually do not work for very long. His point was that this is precisely because they are transplanted from outside the company, rather than being the result of people inside the company improving their thinking about the problems they face.
Wahba's point was not a new one, however. In his book High-Impact Consulting, Robert Shaffer made a resounding statement about all kinds of consulting - not just sales and marketing: "No matter how wise and creative the consultant's analysis and recommendations, they pay off only to the extent that the client does what is necessary to benefit from them. The result is that many consulting projects fail to contribute nearly as much as they might because of the implementation gap, and a great many produce virtually no lasting benefit."[13] As Edwards Deming said "It does not happen all at once. There is no instant pudding."
Scientific methods enable individuals to solve problems. When an engineer succeeds with a difficult problem, he or she can become a hero to his company. It may not really matter if no one else understands how they did it. However, companies require many different people to collaborate if sales and marketing problems are to be solved. And people cannot collaborate without learning and sharing an explicit approach for identifying evidence, generating theories, and experimenting.
Most executives are not taught to pay attention to how their employees think and solve problems. Instead, as described by Brian Joiner in his book Fourth Generation Management, they tend to either dictate the activities they want their people to follow (called "2nd generation" management), or (when that fails) hand down objectives without regard for how they will be achieved (called "3rd generation" management).[14]
Sales productivity has been declining due to changes in their customer's behaviors. For example, Google and the CEB recently reported that B2B companies are avoiding salespeople until as much as 60 to 70% of their company's decision-making process is complete. Companies who study sales and marketing, such as Forrester, commonly admit that chief sales officers are expecting difficulty securing revenue targets. CSO Insights reported that the average sales forecast has a lower probability of winning than a pass bet at the craps tables in Las Vegas. Perhaps it is no wonder the turnover rates of salespeople are often 40% or more.
where assignment of jobs in some cities coincided with an increase in trade and economic interdependence. Division of labour generally also increases both producer and individual worker productivity.
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