Despite all the lip service that has been paid to it, sales is the one area of business activity that has benefited the least from the application of process and process reengineering. While other departments, such as manufacturing and accounting, have been overhauled with Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, and a host of other management philosophies, Sales and Marketing have largely been left to fend for themselves.
Executives and business managers seldom look at a sales organization and ask, ‘What is this department capable of?’ ‘How can we be more efficient?’ or ‘What could be done to boost productivity and throughput?’ More often, corporate goals and sales targets are established first, and then those expectations are simply applied to the sales organization who, in turn, divvy it up; sort of like ’splitting the tab’ after a group dinner in a restaurant: ‘How much does each of us owe?’
If the sales team achieves the goal, then everybody is happy. Never mind the details. Top sales performers are given free reign to do whatever they need to do to bring in business, and underperformers are replaced. As one sales professional put it, when speaking of his quarterly review with his boss and his boss’s boss, ‘They don’t ask how. They just ask how many.’