Note:  This is a podcast of a recent Dirks On Strategy show that aired on November 11, 2009 on WTBQ in New York.

The economy is in shambles. Competition for the same consumer buck is global and fierce. But one sales management consultant takes a unique approach to addressing the sole area that requires minimal improvement but can yield tremendous profit growth. Ziad Khoury, with nearly two decades of helping major companies reap profit windfalls, has authored a new book that centers on the frontline – entry level sales positions, call center agents, customer service staff– and shows how the most substantial new revenue opportunities involve those not traditionally associated with sales rainmakers.

“Indirect sales opportunities are ones that tend to be the most overlooked in many organizations,” says Ziad, author of FRONTLINE PROFIT MACHINE:  The Blueprint For Exploding Profits with your existing Sales and Service Team. “The positions that offer them are often viewed as entry-level, with little thought to the profit influence they have:” Executives of great companies like Nordstrom’s and Enterprise Rent a Car understand the impact of the Frontline and know what an incredible competitive edge that can be in your business.

Ziad helps turn order-takers into sales professionals and poses the question every company must ask itself, “Will we invest in creating a thriving, nearly matchless service-based sales culture that will give us a leg up on our competitors?”

21 Reasons to outsource all or part of your sales process.

1. Reduce costs and risks of hiring and employing.
2. Save time recruiting and managing sales personnel; such as holding them accountable, motivating, worrying about commission payouts, etc.
3. Scalable sales force on an as needed basis.
4. Exisiting sales force is missing key opportunities or is understaffed.
5. Reduced turnover costs and turnover management.
6. More flexibility with your sales team.
7. Sell to underserved territories or across the nation.
8. Ability to focus on your core business needs: products and services.
9. Launch new products without a long term commitment.
10. Speed-to-market. Be the first to market before your competition.
11. Lowered cost per client acquisition.
12. Higher dollar amount per sale average.
13. The ability to reach all lead flow. Following up on older and cold leads.
14. Higher activity per sales person.
15. Higher closing ratio per sales professional.
16. Shorter sales cycle.
17. Sales professionals are in the most optimized sales environment.
18. Greater relationships with prospects and clients.
19. More effective lead generation and prospecting.
20. More detailed reporting and analytics.
21. Acheive fast results and revenue growth, with less risk of your time and money.

Let Launch take your sales to the next level of growth and higher revenue.

Contact us at Sales@launchsalesandmarketing.com or call 801-400-8968.

www.launchsalesandmarketing.com

About Launch Sales and Marketing LLC:

Launch Sales and Marketing LLC provides high quality, scalable, and expert outsourced sales and marketing for businesses. The primary focus is B2B inside sales for technology products and services companies. Launch was started with the passion to bring high quality sales solutions to businesses across the country. Launch helps businesses test markets, have speed-to-market, and to scale nationally.

Located in beautiful Salt Lake City, UT, Launch has positioned itself with excellent talent, partners, and advisory panel to ensure its success. Launch was started during the economic downturn and has succeeded to grow itself as well as its clients revenue all while surrounded by turmoil and uncertainty in the marketplace.

Launch Sales and Marketing LLC is your business-to-business inside sales solution. Whether you are an established firm or a start-up that wants to grow faster, unveil a new product/service, add sales revenue, or scale nationally: Launch is the answer.

Salt Lake City, UT is a playground for the outdoor enthusiast, surrounded by world-class ski resorts (2002 Winter Olympics) and moutnain/road biking, camping, hiking, boating opportunities during the rest of the year. Utah’s lower cost of living and strong communities make it a family friendly place to live. Utah boasts its successful economy and low unemployement rate to it’s thriving entrepreneurial environment.

Launch Sales and Marketing LLC is a product of Junto Partners, founded by Alan Hall and Greg Warnock (Managing Partners of Mercato Partners) who said,”Entrepreneurship can solve problems, create value, unlock human potential, improve lives and foster independence and confidence.” The Junto Partners program leads entrepreneurs in a journey of self discovery regarding their true aptitude in becoming successful entrepreneurs.

www.launchsalesandmarketing.com

Thanks for reading.

At Launch Sales and Marketing, we have a business process to ensure the best results are delivered to each company.
Steps:

1. We interview and research each company to see if they are a good fit for our model and if we fit theirs.

2. We send an account executive/consultant to work closely with the companies sales and marketing teams for 1-3 months to become an expert on their product/service, industry, potential clients, marketing processes, etc.

3. Also, during that time period, the consultant will be building a pipeline with the leads that are given him.

4. At the end of the paid consulting time period, Launch is then capable of finding, recruiting, hiring, training, and managing the best fit sales people for that organization.

5. The sales people hired work for Launch Sales and Marketing LLC and represent our clients product or service. The amount of sales people hired will be determined on the quantity and quality of leads that are being provided by that company.

6. Launch increases sales, closing ratios, revenue, and growth for the company.

Our site www.launchsalesandmarketing.com is being completed. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Please contact us at 801-400-8968 or you can email brandtpage (at) gmail.com

Flip through some random job descriptions for frontline sales managers on CareerBuilder or Monster.  Take a look at the job descriptions for frontline sales managers from a number of industries.  Look closely at the responsibilities and duties the manager is expected to handle.  What do you find?

The Job Duties
If you’ll take the time to look at least a dozen—preferably more—you’ll find a whole slew of duties that frontline managers are expected to perform such as:
•    Recruiting and hiring salespeople–and often clerical staff
•    Training, coaching and mentoring those people
•    Resolving customer issues
•    Coordinating and working with other departments such as shipping, manufacturing, underwriting, finance, etc.
•    Monitoring the local market and competition and keeping management informed of market changes and opportunities
•    Creating and implementing a local sales and marketing plan
•    P&L responsibility for the local office or branch
•    Conduct sales and training meetings
•    Complete reports for management on a weekly, monthly and annual basis
•    Create annual office or branch budget
•    Create monthly and annual sales projections
•    Operate as company’s ambassador to the community by attending community events and maintaining a high visibility in the community
•    Other duties as assigned

And then the kicker:
•    Maintain a high level of personal sales activity and personal production

The first dozen responsibilities listed above are management activities that are—or should be—critical to the growth and profitability of the company.  Most of these activities require someone with strong management, problem solving, and analytical skills.  To properly perform these activities, the individual must have a frame of reference to resolve customer issues, to develop sales and marketing plans, to maximize the return on assets, to properly analyze the local market and competition, and especially, to recruit, train and mentor salespeople.

Only the last item is a purely in-the-trenches sales activity related item.  Yet, as anyone who has been in sales understands, to meet that requirement of ‘maintain a high level of personal sales,” selling must be a full-time job.

The Requirements For The Job
Go further into the job description and you find the ‘requirements’ section, describing the background and experience this individual must have to be considered for the job.  Most typically, that description includes these items:
•    3-5 years direct industry sales experience
•    Proven high level of production, meeting or exceeding quota
•    Strong product knowledge
•    Proven industry contacts and book of business

What’s missing in the requirements for this position?  Of course, not a single word about management skills, aptitude, training or ability.

And how is this individual typically paid?  Usually some combination of base salary, commissions and overrides, or worse, overrides and commissions.

Does It Make Sense?
The above list of responsibilities was gathered from a number of job postings from a number of industries including retail, banking, insurance, securities, medical, software, chemical, consulting, and others.  Most of these job postings listed a majority of the above requirements including the personal production requirement.

Although traditional in many industries, does this combination of duties make sense?  If it does:
•    why are so many offices in these industries poorly run?
•    Why the constant harping by senior management for the offices to keep costs down?
•    Why complaints by marketing that leads aren’t being followed up?
•    Why the complaints by manufacturing and shipping that didn’t know certain things about various orders?
•    Why are commission checks so often wrong?
•    Why is the training and coaching in these companies so poor?
•    Why are so many poor hiring decisions made by the company’s sales managers?

The list could go on.

The reason of course is obvious.  The company didn’t hire a manager, they hired a salesperson to try to keep the herd in line and hopefully end up with the sales numbers the company wanted—and that sales manager is expected to make sure they do through his or her personal sales.

Sales management as so often practiced today is hardly deserving of the term.  And despite the onus being placed on the sales manager by the company, the problem doesn’t lie with the sales manager.  Typically, the company got exactly what they wanted—a top salesperson willing to assume responsibility they haven’t been prepared for in exchange for a title.

Can Companies Afford to Continue This Way?
For most companies, selling is becoming a bigger and bigger challenge.  Competition is fierce, their products are most often indistinguishable from their competitor’s, their markets are becoming more fragmented, their prospects are better educated and more demanding than ever before.

Management as a sideline, although traditional in a great number of industries, is costing companies billions of dollars every year in lost opportunities, bad hires, poor local market decisions, lack of resource utilization and lost sales.

In a complex world with razor sharp competition and astute prospects who often know more than the people trying to sell to them, companies can no longer afford to use management positions as rewards for past production.  Frontline managers are increasingly becoming the focal point of a company’s success or failure.

Many companies have already begun to change their management philosophy and have eliminated the selling manager position and have replaced them with full-time, qualified, and trained managers.  To this end, they have instituted manager training and coaching programs hiring outside companies and coaches to work with their new and existing management staff.

Take Action Now
If you are in a producing manager role, hire a sales management coach to help you prepare for the realities of the changing environment you are entering.  Those items within your job description that haven’t been emphasized in the past are becoming increasingly important.

If you’re a senior manager, consider whether a producing manager is really worth the lost revenue and lost opportunities.  Your company’s selling environment isn’t going to get easier.

There is a new debate just beginning to bubble to the surface and it promises to be lively and the views divergent.  Forty years ago computer technology sent a man to the moon.  Thirty years ago computer technology began taking over the running of autos, trucks, trains and the rest of our transportation system.  Twenty years ago computer technology began to change forever how small businesses are run.  Ten years ago computer technology began to change how we shop, find information, and even communicate with one another.

Now, finally, computer technology is just beginning to tackle the greatest mystery of all—what do salespeople and sales managers really do with their time?  How do they really find new prospects?  Who are those prospects?  What do they sell them?  How long is the sales cycle really?  These and dozens of other questions are in the process of slowly being answered.

The technology that is delving into these questions is in its infancy.  Client Relationship Management (CRM), Sales Performance Management (SPM), and Sales Force Automation (SFA) programs are inching their way into every company—even the smallest.  How and why companies use these programs are myriad—and to some extent unknown—not just to the developers of the programs but also to the companies themselves.

Today, there are dozens of programs on the market with many more in development.  Some gather minimal information, others are designed to gather great chunks.  Some focus on compensation management, some on defining the profile of customers, others on defining sales team profiles, and others focus their attention on the performance and activities of individual salespeople.  Some, such as CRM are stand-alone programs while others such as SPM and SFA are typically integrated into CRM programs.

In other words, the sales metrics industry is still searching for its place, its function in the marketplace.

However, the result is going to be a shockwave through companies and in particular the sales department.  For the first time companies will have far more real data on their sales and prospecting efforts than ever.  And the volume, width and depth of that information will continue to grow.

No one knows exactly how these programs will change the way the sales function will be managed.  However, there are a great number of questions that must be addressed—and they must be addressed now as companies, salespeople, and managers struggle to adapt to and work with this technology:
•  What do companies really want the technology to do?
•  What, in the end, can the technology really do well?
•  How do companies integrate the systems into their sales teams and get the support of salespeople and managers?
•  What will managers really do with the information?
•  How will the information be used to change how companies and salespeople sell?
•  Will the information be used for coaching and training their salespeople—or as a club to threaten and cajole?
•  What will this information mean for marketing, production, advertising and the other departments?
•  More fundamentally, which programs work and which don’t?
•  Which programs are salesperson friendly and which aren’t?
•  Which programs gather truly useful information and which don’t?
•  What do real live salespeople, managers and executives think of the programs they are using or contemplating?

The list could go on and on.

The debate about technology and how it will be used and integrated, how it will change the sales function and the people within sales departments, and how it will change companies themselves should be of importance to all of us.  This technology is going to affect every one of us—salesperson, manager, executive, shareholder, trainer, consultant, developer alike.

Yet, the discussion and debate has barely begun.

A new blog, The Management Curve, has just been launched to discuss and debate this very issue.  The blog will tackle the questions above—and much more.

Hosted by Paul McCord, the blog will bring in other trainers, consultants, developers, managers, executives, and salespeople to discuss and debate the impact this technology will have.  The focus of the blog is narrow—how metrics gathering technology will change the way the sales function is managed and ultimately how that will change the way salespeople sell and how that will change the company itself.

I encourage you to visit The Management Curve, add it to your RSS feed reader, add it to your blogroll, save it to your favorites file, visit it often.  Over the next few weeks you’ll find more and more guests coming on and offering their opinions, insights, and positions.  It isn’t a homogenous group—there will be many perspectives and many opinions.  No matter your position on the subject, it is one that is going to have a tremendous impact on you in a very real and personal way.