About this Presentation
The entire customer interface for a typical industrial organization is outdated and dysfunctional. Justin will argue from first principles for a complete rethink of sales, engineering, and the design of the distribution model. Your senior management team won’t like these truths. They won’t necessarily argue that they are false, they just won’t like the organization-wide implications of them. The good news is that your competitors’ management teams will like them even less! The better news is that if you have the resolve to transform your organization around these 8 truths, you will quickly open up an unassailable lead on your competitors. 1. Your Operations group should be responsible for revenue. Sales should focus exclusively on growth. 2. You should be optimizing for speed—not proximity—to customer. 3. You need to fix your partnerships (yep, they’re broken) to ensure clear demarcation lines between manufacturer and reseller. 4. You need to fix your engineering department (salespeople aren’t engineers and production engineers aren’t design engineers). 5. Your sales team should be selling programs, not products. 6. Your salespeople should be inside. Application engineers should be in the field. 7. Virtually all sales activity should be campaign (not account) based. 8. Salespeople should be paid salaries, not commissions (and performance should not be optional).
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.
The speaker argues that the operations department, not sales, should be responsible for revenue in a typical organization.
Salespeople should focus on selling programs, not products, and should be based inside, not in the field.
Engineering departments should be split into design engineers who are sales-facing and production engineers who are production-facing.
Instructor(s)
Justin Roff-Marsh
For 20 years, Justin Roff-Marsh’s deep thinking and writing on Sales Process Engineering has blazed a trail for others to follow. Justin is the author of The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function. (Winner of Gold in the Sales category of the Axiom Business Book Awards.) And he’s the founder of Ballistix—a consultancy with operations in the USA and Australia, delivering engagements worldwide. Although Justin was a science nut as a child (and still is today), he commenced his career in sales. He sold insurance and then progressed to manage a team of 100 salespeople. He then co-founded a firm that sold financial education and quickly discovered that his product lacked the margins required to sustain a typical field-based sales force. He developed his approach to sales process engineering in response to this challenge. Justin’s approach to the sales process is as revolutionary as Deming’s was to manufacturing. He argues passionately that the application of scientific management principles to the sales process is the next great uncharted frontier for industry.