About this Presentation
Increasing the sales productivity of TOC consultants is discussed to help the attendees understand what they must do to cause sales. They can use the principles to create sales in their own businesses and to also help their clients create sales. Key learning points include: 1. How to create sales opportunities. 2. The two causes of sales success. 3. How to measure and manage both causes. 4. What you must know about your clients to insure their success (and yours).
What Will You Learn
To help you get the most value from this session, we’ve highlighted a few key points. These takeaways capture the main ideas and practical insights from the presentation, making it easier for you to review, reflect, and apply what you’ve learned.
This session reframes software development as a flow system, showing how Feature-Driven Development can combine TOC, Lean, and Six Sigma thinking to improve speed, quality, and predictability without relying on traditional task-heavy control methods.
A core insight is that features should be treated like inventory. By managing feature sets, work-in-process, and lead time visibly, software teams can expose bottlenecks, smooth flow, and make better decisions about release scope and execution.
The presentation shows how Critical Chain thinking can be adapted to software by scheduling around feature-set groupings, aggregating buffers, and managing the real system constraint instead of tracking every task in isolation.
It also brings in Lean and Six Sigma disciplines through cumulative flow diagrams, control charts, and variation analysis, giving teams a practical way to detect instability, manage uncertainty, and improve throughput at the software engineering constraint.
Instructor(s)
Bill Hodgdon
Bill Hodgdon is widely recognized within the TOC community as the leading authority on sales productivity issues. He is a Jonah and worked with Eli Goldratt on some of the Thinking Process tools for Eli’s book, It’s Not Luck. His firm helps companies improve their top line performance. He has presented at several TOC conferences and has helped many TOC companies achieve their growth goals.
His papers on causing growth have been published in national and international publications throughout the last two decades. A former operations manager and engineering manager at a Fortune 100 electronics company, President and owner of a manufacturing firm serving the Department of Defense and Tier I suppliers to various industries, his concepts come from 30 years of in-the-trenches experience in manufacturing, distribution, marketing and sales.