Sales is a process? (a book review)

Our new company president is an engineer. (Full disclosure: I have my BSME, but never worked as an engineer.)

For his new role over sales, he said he was ‘reading a book’. He proudly touted that the book said ‘sales is a process’, meaning it can be repeatable, measurable, and generally formulaic, just like engineering can be. Groans by salespeople were common.

So I hand him my copy of Making the Number: How to Use Sales Benchmarking to Drive Performance, which says pretty much the same thing. Since my copy was given to me as a preview copy by co-author, Mike Drapeau, I thought I would ask him about this point. He replied:

I think that the Demming quote we have at the beginning of Chapter 9 says it all: ““If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing”.

So often salespeople mistake the necessary creativity they must express to succeed in their jobs with the belief that what they do cannot be improved, managed, and measured through a structured framework that describes what to do, by whom, how, when, and why.

This seems to some to smack of formalism and they make haste to point out the exceptional conditions where such an approach would not be successful.

However, sales is a numbers game and, given equal talent on both sides, a sales force that has a defined approach will succeed over one that has none every time. This is the essence of sales process and the benchmarking metrics that go along with it.

I found this book a refreshing look at sales management. Sales managers can be just as ‘creative’ as salespeople, especially with setting goals and making decisions that they believe will generate sales. Their creativity can often seem unfair or irrelevant.

Mike and his co-authors take a step back and ask ‘what are your goals’, ‘what works’, and ‘what can be measured’. The answers lead to a ‘benchmarking’ process that then makes a more logical measurement and goal system for sales.

Hmm, Sales is a process!

While crunching numbers and making hard decisions about what to measure are not things sales managers may want to do, this book works as much as a guide as well as a wake-up call.

We haven’t redone our sales programs based on this book, but it is influencing our thinking, and our smaller decisions about measurement and reward.

Check out the Amazon listing for reviews that help explain the content more than I just did:

Making the Number: How to Use Sales Benchmarking to Drive Performance