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Lean Sales Management

During the past few weeks as we have been leading our clients through developing potential business contingency plans for challenging times and during our workshops at the IW Business Builder programs "Build and Growth your Microsoft Practice in Challenging Times" (see Sharpening Up Your Skills), we have stressed the following element: Focus on brilliant execution.

What we mean by this is based upon a management program very popular in the manufacturing section called "Lean Management." The program is based upon the concept that management and teams of employees must focus on each step of any particular process to eliminate waste/fat and therefore be more efficient and run the day to day operations more lean. At Acumen we are encouraging all our clients to consider setting up "teams" to focus on aspects of their operations, from delivery, to sales, to administration.

The first step is to analyze and fully document each function -- whether it is proposal generation to taking customer service calls -- and seek ways to take out costs and increase efficiencies. Management must consider this is not a one-time event but an ongoing philosophy and a never-ending process. Once one function is worked on -- and improved -- move to another departmental area.

For three months, we ran a series of newsletter articles titled the Sales Factory, breaking down the concept of manufacturing and how sales organizations must focus on production concepts to increase predictable revenue. If you want a copy of the three articles, send me an e-mail.

If you have not visited and downloaded the Playbooks and exhibits for your SharePoint, UC, Project Mgmt and BI practices from our Microsoft workshops go to: https://partner.microsoft.com/us/bb. They are terrific for improving your business planning, marketing planning and sales strategy.

Posted by Ken Thoreson on February 04, 2009


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