About this Presentation
This presentation describes a radical approach to managing a sales force with five scheduled appointments, five days a week; appointments prioritized according to probability yield, the use of an opportunity buffer maintained without sales personnel involvement and the elimination of budgets, targets, bonuses and commissions. The new approach is contrasted against the traditional sales management approach and described in detail giving broad results.
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 challenges the traditional sales model by treating sales as a throughput system, not a personality-driven craft. The core idea is that sales capacity should be engineered around the true constraint rather than left to the habits of individual salespeople. 2.A major insight is that many sales activities consume time without contributing directly to throughput. By separating roles, removing clerical and opportunity-management burdens from salespeople, and introducing dedicated coordinators, organizations can protect the constraint and increase productive selling time.
The presentation introduces the opportunity buffer as a powerful TOC device for sales. Opportunities are treated like a managed flow item, appointments are programmed by relative value and stage, and the buffer is maintained without salesperson involvement to stabilize performance and reduce variability.
The results point to a very different performance system: commissions and bonuses are eliminated, variability drops, cycle time improves, conversion rates rise, support staffing increases, and throughput grows without a corresponding rise in operating expense or investment.
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.