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“There’s a crisis in marketing and sales today,” said Michael J. Webb, president of Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. “For the first time, 50 percent of all sales people failed to meet their quota last year.”
Webb, who spoke to students and GSB alumni at Gleacher Center during a May 25 Chicago GSB Marketing Roundtable, said that the answer is to work smarter, not harder. He advocates applying the Six Sigma, or “process” approach—usually used to make manufacturing more efficient—to marketing and sales as well. Six Sigma is a data-based approached that helps companies measure how effectively they use their resources.
The key, he said, is not to follow more leads or hire new sales staff, but to measure what’s important: “the profit the customer makes as a result of what you do for them.” Then, he said, directors of marketing and sales should figure out which customers are most helped by the company’s products and how to give them even higher value. Often that entails changing the strategies and processes a sales or marketing team uses. Part of this is making sure that a team has access to decision makers and those who influence decision makers.
“You are successful when you focus on getting someone—the customer—to take an action: to read your articles, go to your Web site, read your proposal, take your meeting,” Webb said. “And you do this by attracting the right customers, designing solutions to people’s problems and having a friendly, responsive interface. You add value to them until they are ready to buy.”
Jennifer Vanasco