PandaDoc

OCTOBER 14, 2020

The Request For Proposal (RFP) process is broken, flawed, and disorganized. When you’re down in the weeds, entangled in the messy process, it can be hard to figure out how to make improvements. If you were to time your RFP creation process, how much time gets sunk into each one? Luckily, technology is our saving grace.

Process 139

Process Teamwork Assembly Line Transportation 139

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 27, 2018

Even concepts of insight based selling are repackaging of consultative, solution, customer focused selling programs of the 60s, 70s, 90s. Even concepts of insight based selling are repackaging of consultative, solution, customer focused selling programs of the 60s, 70s, 90s. But there are limitations to this.

Sell 115

Sell Objection handling Assembly Line Territory 115

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 9, 2020

The buying process is messy, a characteristic of intensely human interaction. We map the buying process, ending up with something that resembles Gartner’s famous “spaghetti” charts. Buying can be confusing–both in managing the internal buying process, but in, also, in assessing the alternative solutions.

Sell 96

Sell Assembly Line High impact Up-sell 96

Partners in Excellence

JULY 11, 2024

When we sell physical products, they are usually offered in some form of outright purchase. ” Let’s imagine we sell manufacturing equipment. We’ve sold to a customer with a single manufacturing line, but now they are expanding the number of manufacturing lines so they need to buy more.

Assembly Line 138

Assembly Line Manufacturing GTM CRM 138

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 5, 2021

Too many organizations seem so focused on their own efficiency, mechanizing our process, and transactionalizing our engagement strategies. We are creating massive sales assembly lines optimizing the order taking process. At the time, many of us were alarmed with that statistic. We usually win on pricing.

Assembly Line 143

Assembly Line Sales Price Trust 143

Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 24, 2018

” Sales picks up the process, SDRs call to qualify the opportunity, they hand the lead to an account manager who gets more information, the customer is handed over to a pre-sales person for a demo, then someone else try to close them. Except our assembly line/linear customer engagement model doesn’t reflect how our customers buy.

Assembly Line 118

Assembly Line Sales Process Account management 118

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 12, 2023

There seems to be an arrogance or conceit in so many of the conversations I see about the future of selling. My feeds are filled with new technologies, new selling models, new engagement strategies, new organizational structures. Sellers have, blindly, applied “manufacturing” technique to managing their selling process.

Assembly Line 125

Assembly Line Customers Tradeshows Manufacturing 125

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 21, 2017

We seem to be approaching or passing the tipping point where leading sales practitioners view successful selling as a disciplined, focused, engineered approach to engaging and creating value for customers. Stated differently, moving more toward selling as a science. We’ve focused more on the mechanics and less on the people.

Sell 88

Sell Assembly Line Manufacturing Up-sell 88

Partners in Excellence

AUGUST 8, 2024

” “Can we improve processes upstream, by helping our suppliers improve what they are doing with us?” ” A mindset instilled in each worker in the assembly line was, “how do you improve the part of the process you are responsible for?” How can we make things simpler?

Assembly Line 139

Assembly Line GTM Manufacturing Engineering 139

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 10, 2018

At the end, Brent Adamson pulled me to the side asking, “Dave, you seem to have a pretty dark outlook about selling, what’s up?” Am I contributing to it’s improvement and the ability of sales to contribute to our customers and the companies we sell for?” The mindless focus on volume/velocity.

Sell 93

Sell Assembly Line Up-sell Cold Call 93

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 27, 2024

For some reason, there’s a huge attraction to applying “manufacturing techniques” to selling. I suspect it’s the perceived orderliness to manufacturing processes and the predictability of the outcome. The lean approaches applied to manufacturing create a hyper efficient process. that we want?”

Manufacturing 62

Manufacturing Assembly Line Sell Up-sell 62

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 27, 2017

It’s become common “wisdom” that we have to align align our sales process with our customers’ buying processes. I suppose it’s easy to want to believe customers have buying processes. Certainly, procurement has processes they follow in their buying activities.

Process 70

Process Customers Assembly Line Manufacturing 70

Partners in Excellence

MAY 25, 2021

When I started selling, I had the responsibility for growing a very large banking account. So specialists in check processing helped customer re-engineer their processes. The customer has become almost irrelevant, instead, we have optimized roles for moving our customer through our sales assembly line.

Assembly Line 133

Assembly Line Account management Education Sell 133

Sales Hacker

MARCH 3, 2021

Isn’t it ultra-satisfying to watch a perfectly automated factory assembly line? What is the handoff process? A handoff process refers to the period where a lead becomes a customer and handed over to the customer success team from the sales team. Why is the handoff process important? See how smooth things are?

Process 98

Process Assembly Line Drivers/motivators UX 98

Partners in Excellence

MAY 23, 2024

Since the target customers, initially, for these tools were individuals and small teams, the methods others had used in consumer product selling were adapted. When customers said tell me more, the sales process was usually pretty short. And assembly line process started to emerge. It seemed so predictable.

Assembly Line 77

Assembly Line GTM Minimum Viable Product Non-Profits 77

Partners in Excellence

MAY 25, 2024

The underlying principles of all of these is an assembly line mentality in workflow design. What drives productivity and efficiency is a continuous flow process, structured Takt times which set the pace of the process, and standardized work. If bad or flawed materials were introduced into the process, the line collapsed.

Assembly Line 77

Assembly Line Manufacturing Contract Represent 77

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 18, 2017

The focus in much of our discussions on selling is about us–sales people. We have highly focused roles, each role focuses on it’s job in the sales process, once complete, the widget–I mean customer, is passed to the next function, then the next, then the next… on down the sales assembly line.

Assembly Line 70

Assembly Line Sell Customers Up-sell 70

ClickFunnels

JUNE 18, 2021

Our co-founder, Russel Brunson, has developed a sales funnel model called The Value Ladder, which we believe is the most effective way to sell online. Here’s how the process of producing a piece of such content looks like: You do keyword research, identify promising keywords, and pick a keyword that you want to focus on.

Minimum Viable Product 229

Minimum Viable Product Assembly Line Niche Sales 229

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 6, 2017

I’ve always been biased more to the science side of selling than the art side. I believe that selling is a disciplined process, that we can “engineer” those processes to increase our impact, customer engagement, and our effectiveness. Much of this seems to be a R 3.0 approach to Predictable Revenue.

Assembly Line 81

Assembly Line SQL Trust Sales 81

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 31, 2017

We design our organizations to be lean mean selling machines. Each step of our sales process is optimized to maximize the results our sales people get. We recognize different skills and capabilities are needed in different stages of the sales process. Sales people move nimbly from tool to tool to tool.

Assembly Line 81

Assembly Line Manufacturing Account management B2B 81

Partners in Excellence

JANUARY 5, 2023

Pile onto this all the shifts in buyer behavior we see, increasing numbers of buyers actively disengaging with sellers, preferring to navigate their buying processes with out sales help. Our sequences, our assembly line techniques for herding through processed that are optimized for us will fail!

Customers 133

Customers Assembly Line Commission Technique 133

Partners in Excellence

SEPTEMBER 9, 2018

Often, these are those with the assembly line version of selling, optimizing our process, treating the customer as a widget they move through the process—lead, SDR, Demo, Account Manager, Specialist, Customer Experience Team… The customer is an object upon which we execute our selling process, working the numbers.

Assembly Line 92

Assembly Line Account management Gaming Sell 92

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 30, 2020

” “We are expanding our factory capacity and need to add a new assembly line, can we talk about your products as a potential solution?” Don’t they know I don’t sell that stuff? . “We are looking to buy electronic components to use in a new consumer product we are developing.

Prospecting 113

Prospecting Customers Assembly Line Education 113

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 15, 2021

We redesign knowledge work, emulating the principles of the industrial assembly lines of the past. We chop up work, creating assembly lines where knowledge workers focus on perhaps the functional equivalent of tightening a bolt. them passing the work to the next person in the knowledge worker assembly line.

Assembly Line 77

Assembly Line Manufacturing Government Up-sell 77

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 1, 2022

We’re also brought to you by Vidyard — the best way to sell in a virtual world, whether you need to connect with more leads, qualify more opportunities, or close more deals. Make prospecting videos, follow-ups, product demos, and other communications that drive virtual selling. Welcome to the Sales Hacker podcast.

Commission 103

Commission Quota Assembly Line Sales 103

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 12, 2023

So much of what our focus in “modern selling,” seems to be the adaptation of Lean Manufacturing techniques into selling. We’ve created “assembly lines” with specialized functions, passing our customers from one station to the next. In a lean factory line, the entire line would stop.

Manufacturing 71

Manufacturing Assembly Line Technique Quota 71

Highspot

JULY 31, 2020

After all, you wouldn’t put a new recruit in charge of your enterprise accounts; similarly, a rep with deep experience in healthcare would probably struggle to sell into tech. There are three main models for sales teams: the assembly line, the pod, and the island. The Assembly Line. Is not suited to scale.

Assembly Line 72

Assembly Line Territory Strategize Sales 72

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 13, 2021

And, while I will contradict my opening premises, too much of the time, in seeking “predictable revenue,” we treat every aspect of selling as laws etched in granite. They recognize the real value in the organization has nothing to do with what they sell, or the tools, programs, processes, and so forth.

Assembly Line 107

Assembly Line Quota Prospecting Up-sell 107

Sales Hacker

MARCH 17, 2021

Strict sales volume does go a long way in achieving long-term revenue growth, but processes and cross-department alignment are what allow sales volumes to scale in the first place. Maintaining the same processes. The same can be said about technology, CRM usage, and the overall process. The problem? This person doesn’t exist.

Growth 114

Growth Assembly Line Cross-sell Engineering 114

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 17, 2018

After all, AI and ML will solve all the problems of the selling world. If we structure our engagement process to be more transactional, the assembly line process becomes very attractive. This mechanized view of selling, means our view of talent is very different.

Assembly Line 88

Assembly Line Pitch Sales Growth 88

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 4, 2016

I believe selling is a set of disciplined processes, many of which can be “engineered” to optimize our ability to engage the right customers/prospects, with the right conversations, at the right time. We’ve developed predictable models of moving these customers through the process in very high volumes/velocity.

Assembly Line 60

Assembly Line Customers Manufacturing Objectives and Key Results 60

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 22, 2017

I read an article in which the position was put forth, “Inside sales does not have the responsibility for creating pipeline, only the responsibility for selling. The speaker was clearly smart and had been very successful in selling, perhaps there was something I misunderstood. The concept of “team selling” arose.

Sell 57

Sell Territory Assembly Line Manufacturing 57

Partners in Excellence

JUNE 6, 2017

The right process will produce the right results: Principle 2: Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface. Principle 6: Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment. The sales process is fundamental. Principle 4: Level out the workload.

Manufacturing 85

Manufacturing Assembly Line Sales Process 85

Martech

NOVEMBER 18, 2022

The assembly line. It’s also the process behind what makes it happen. The same applies to touchscreen technology and many other processes and products that came together to allow something new to exist. Attempting to rush the process usually backfires, as well. Processing. The airplane. Get MarTech!

Assembly Line 123

Assembly Line Launch Real Estate Electricity 123

Partners in Excellence

FEBRUARY 1, 2017

But something has changed in selling. Plus we are investing in tools, programs, processes, and training to help them become more productive. At a macro level, selling expense hasn’t changed markedly many complex B2B segments. It may be the systems, tools, processes we put in place.

Assembly Line 80

Assembly Line Quota Sales Construction 80

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 4, 2017

It isn’t their ability to self educate, to engage other buyers in social conversations, or even to process their buying transaction electronically. What’s killing sales is sales people and leaders unwilling to do the work of selling! We know people buy from people, yet we create assembly line/transactional processes.

Assembly Line 69

Assembly Line Sales Education Pitch 69

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 8, 2019

But the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in a bit of a dark place on the “state of selling.” Sadly, too many sales executives, too many clueless corporate executives; all supported by vendors and consultants trying to sell them something are in a mad rush in exactly the opposite direction. Principle Based Selling!

Assembly Line 88

Assembly Line Trust Consult Up-sell 88