Book review – Making the Number
After reviewing Making the Number, there are a number of points about sales benchmarking that apply to our own theories about marketing.
The scoreboard for sales professional is and always has been the pay stub – this is the crudest form of sales benchmarking. For marketing, it has always been a bit stickier and this is because there has been a disconnect between sales and marketing in most organizations. Ironically, now it is more important than ever to make sure these two are aligned.
Here’s why.
Sources of competitive advantage have shrunk. What it really boils down to is customer satisfaction and customers are harder than ever to satisfy. The Internet has contributed greatly to this trend by arming consumers with a plethora of information before marketing departments have the opportunity to bombard them with ineffective, corporate messaging efforts. “Citizen marketers,” as the book refers to them, have made it impossible for marketing and sales to exist solely within the four walls of corporate America, and away from scrutiny. Web 2.0 technologies – blogs, wikis, social networking and so on – allow buyers to self-service, bypassing corporate marketing’s efforts. Therefore, the sales team plays a vital role as the buffer between customer experience and marketing. The sales force must execute the positive customer experience that marketing departments are communicating.
Thus, sales campaigns become like a chess match, where you need a solid strategy and where the ability to think trumps the ability to work hard. And data driven decision-making arms salespeople with the tools they need to be successful.
Sales benchmarking requires companies to review the sometimes unseen links between process and result. This review encourages an objective look at practices, systems and metrics and challenges business methods that should be scrutinized; and provides a means for driving change in the sales process.
In the sales process, there are a number of intangibles – things we would rather measure by how they “appear” or “seem.” The same is often true with marketing. The soft metrics of appearance make it difficult to measure.
The authors of Making the Number point out that successful benchmarking is only possible through data. By assigning key performance indicators (KPIs) to reflect key parts of the sales process, a sales manager can assess whether or not a campaign is successful and what needs to be continued or abandoned.
The authors are quick to point out that benchmarking is not merely a comparison of your current performance with that of past performances or a collection of meaningless data that cannot be applied to positive change. The benchmarking process must be repeatable, consistent, reliable, trustable, measureable and comprehensible. In other words, it must first lend itself to multiple iterations. There must be no logical contradictions. The same results should be produced when the process is followed correctly. All process activity must be described and defined. There must be metrics that enable the measurement of work within the process and it must contain instructions that are understood within all roles of the process.
Benchmarking is not an instant fix for companies who have broken sales and marketing processes, and it is not a way to force the organization to make the necessary changes. It is a merely a dashboard of what is going on inside and outside of the organization – a way to evaluate what processes are working and which are not. Only leadership and management can enforce and implement positive change.
The key is to making this change happen is implement best practices with benchmarking. First, identify the companies that excel in their business. Get their buy in to study their policies, technique and operating environment. Discover ways to transfer their best practices to your organization in a way that makes sense. Finally, implement these new best practices within your own organization, evaluate the process and continuously improve upon this method.
Part of this process is determining your sales management’s maturity level. Level one is the chaos level where activity is mostly ad hoc. The second level is the defined level where processes are documented but not necessarily consistent. Level three is the reportable level where the process has actually been adopted. Level four is the managed level which consists of quantitative sales management and level five is the predictable level where sales management is predictive and casual. Once you determine what sales maturity level your organization is at, you can work on advancing to higher levels through the employment of a consistent winning strategy.
The next step is the actual data collection, which is the most labor-intensive part of the benchmarking process and also where the organization begins to get a detailed view of internal and external operations.
A company will experience a sustained competitive advantage when sales benchmarking moves from being a one-time event to being embedded in the operating procedures of the company. You must understand that your peers will not stand still. Sales benchmarking needs to become a standard operating procedure and part of your company’s long-term strategy for success.
One of the biggest excuses companies see against adopting benchmarking as a regular business process is “Things are going well – we don’t need it.” The problem with this attitude is that you are looking behind instead of ahead. It may be very likely that if you are successful today, you will be successful tomorrow. But it is not a given and it would probably do you well to be sure that your company is doing what it needs to in order to stay on top.
Regardless of the obstacles presented by companies or employees that are hesitant to adopt benchmarking, each can be overcome. It is important to keep future successes in mind and to know that the sooner you implement continuous benchmarking, the sooner you will find the facts you need to make sure your sales organization is consistently a success.
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