TOCICO

The design of the sales function has hardly changed in the last 100 years. Sure, there’s new technology and fancy new verbiage – but the basics remain unchanged. Salespeople still operate autonomously, they still own relationships with customers and they still, predominantly, earn commissions. This is in spite of the fact that salespeople are fast becoming less relevant to customers than they have ever been before. Given the choice, customers are voting with their feet and transacting online, rather than interacting with salespeople, whenever they have the opportunity. At last, we have a new approach to the design of sales. A radical departure from standard practice that eliminates salespeople’s autonomy, returns the ownership of customers to the organization and banishes sales commissions. The approach – what Justin Roff-Marsh calls sales process engineering (SPE) involves the industrialization of the sales function: the application of division-of-labor, the formalization of workflows and the centralization of scheduling. This new approach is totally compatible with the rapid migration of business to the Internet and it forces a much tighter integration of the organization as a whole (new product development, marketing, sales, engineering, and production).