Tag Archives: Lost

How Do You Establish Sales Accountability? Three Approaches

Situation: Several CEOs have experienced difficulty establishing accountability within their sales teams. Sone sales reps consistently come up with excuses for not generating new accounts or meeting their sales objectives. The impact of lost sales had significant effects on revenue performance. How do you establish sales accountability?
Advice from the CEOs:
• It is vital to understand who are the best customers and most profitable products and services for those customers. Establish regular sales meetings to discuss customers, products and services, to identify promising sales opportunities and to coordinate sales efforts.
• Work with both sales management and individual team members to determine desired outcomes:
 Set sales targets – work with the team to establish firm expectations on reasonable and achievable sales targets. Agree on a tracking system to measure progress toward those targets. Encourage members of the team to work together to achieve the targets.
 Customer type – who are they, what are their priorities and expectations, and how can the company best address these.
 Product(s) – work with the team to determine which products best fit each customer type and develop creative ways to position those products to increase sales.
• Establish measurable behaviors which if done will result in success. For example:
 Calls per week and results of those calls.
 Relationships with key decision makers and development of additional relationships within existing and potential customers.
 Thorough qualification before quoting, presenting, demo, and so on. The who, what and why that connects with successful sales..

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How Do You Implement a Process Change? Six Suggestions

Situation: The CEO of a service company is concerned about lost income from uncaptured billing. He has identified the cause – failure to capture extra hours that haven’t been billed – but is struggling to get employees to monitor this more effectively. How do you implement a process change?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The group presented two options for growth: bring in experienced outside people to develop additional systems to run the company, or a hybrid model using internal resources, augmented with outside expertise.
  • Bring in Experienced Outside Resources: Hire an experienced outsider with a track record in your industry to design and implement the needed systems.
    • Pros for this solution: the outsider will bring a fresh vision and new energy, plus the experience and know-how to make the desired changes.
    • Cons: impact on current business culture. This may generate resentment among employees who can no longer make decisions on the spot and may remove a path to management for existing staff. Possible negative impact on customers who receive larger bills due to change orders.
  • Hybrid Model: Outside person creates model and trains employees to implement it, then monitors the system and progress long-term. The key is to change expectations and behavior within the team.
    • Pros for this solution: more opportunity for current employee participation; involves employees in the design of the system, providing better buy-in to the solution.
    • Cons: as with any change, this won’t provide the full expected return. Just the fact that things are being changed impacts the efficiency of implementation. Unanticipated blocks and resistance may hinder progress – don’t be surprised by this, it is predictable.
  • Implement SOPs that facilitate rapid response to change orders – starting now and with whichever option is chosen.
  • Generate a pick list of all possible change orders with pre-calculated costs to guide employee choices and keep customers informed.
  • Whatever solution is chosen, be sure to communicate frequently and consistently with employees to facilitate the change.

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How Do You Improve Quote to Collections Flow? Four Tactics

Situation: A company is losing billings because individual billings are getting lost in their process flow. Requests for enhancements come from clients to Project Managers. Project Managers take on development of the enhancements but are sometimes too busy to keep track and don’t report their work to the billing department. How do you improve quote to collections flow?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • It appears that two processes are missing:
    • A formal trigger mechanism to assure that a PO is in place BEFORE Project Managers undertake enhancement work, and
    • Managers are incentivized to assure that the client is billed and revenue collected for the work performed.
  • Formalize the process and do not allow Project Mangers to initiate any work until a work request is logged in the billing system and a PO is received from the customer to cover the expense.
    • Develop a process to track customer requests, estimate development and transmission to billing, forwarding of estimates by billing to the customer with a request for a PO, and upon receipt of PO authorization by billing to initiate work.
    • This can all be tracked and managed by most accounting software packages.
    • This process will:
      • Facilitate tracking of actual expense vs. estimate;
      • Tracking of requests for which no POs are received, for client follow-up; and
      • Tracking of enhancement requests to guide future product development.
  • Compensate Account Managers to track and manage the process.
    • If an Account Manager receives a commission for enhancement work they will have an incentive to keep track of all ongoing work, both for timely delivery and to assure that the customer invoiced for the work.
    • Commissions paid to the Account Mangers will be a small percent of the extra revenue collected.
    • To improve process management, schedule regular meetings to review all enhancement and other work being done for clients. Review and assure that all work has accompanying POs, that the work is being completed on a timely basis and in line with original estimates, and that the company is invoicing and being paid for the work. Empower Account Managers to organize and conduct these meetings. Their incentive will be the commissions they will collect on payment for the work.
  • Build upgrades and a certain number of enhancements into the product price.
    • This enables to company to increase prices and to collect prepayment for enhancements and upgrades that may or may not be requested.
    • Use the process outlined above to track enhancements which are credited against the prepaid accounts, and to assure that enhancements above the prepaid limit are invoiced.

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