As a sales manager for a document output distributor, I spend much of my time evaluating prospective sales to plan our pricing, equipment configuration, and service strategy with the salesperson. The process is valuable because it gives both the salesperson and I a chance to ‘think out loud’ about the deal. We explore potential objections, consider the best pricing model to fit the customer’s needs, and discuss the deal overall. It normally ends with an ‘ah-ha’ moment where we both realize that the best way to approach the next meeting with the customer, and how best to position our solution.

Although every customer is different, each sale has several common elements. I realized this the other day that despite these commonalities, I had been handling these meetings differently with each salesperson. More specifically, when evaluating costs some sales people would write out their customer’s details on a nice worksheet, while others would scribble it on a post-it note. It occurred to me that I had been doing this strategery for a long time, but had never reviewed it or thought through how I could standardize it to ensure that we were covering all our bases when evaluating a deal. At a minimum, I could create a spreadsheet that would automatically calculate costs so that we were not relying on our chicken-scratch & calculator.

So in my own private ‘ah-ha’ moment, I realized that I had to review what I was doing periodically. I resolved to evaluate this process and others in hopes to make them more effective. I would start by creating a template to evaluate deals that leveraged the tools we have at our disposal. As encouragement to you, take a minute to think about what you do each day. Review it and see if you can streamline it, make it better, or simply make it more accurate.

Jeff Pitney is a long time veteran of the document imaging industry and has worked in both sales and sales management capacities for manufacturers and independent dealers alike. Jeff also runs Pitney Application Design, building websites and custom integrations for web-based solutions.

We all love making exceptions to our processes. Sure we know there are going to be exceptions to our rules, but to work in a role supporting a high-touch organization might be so much so that I might liken it to an exercise in continually asking asking someone to stop kicking you in the backside only to find out after the 20th time you’ve been sporting a “Kick Me I’m Stupid!” sign on your back.

Wow, that was a bit harsh… but let me draw a parallel here from the industry within which I work: Does it not strike you that just about every sales person in the copier industry is wildly egotistical - at least the good ones are, don’t you think? It’s not like they are mean people, nor are they out to get everyone. No, it is just a simple matter of forgetting the sun, moon, and stars don’t really revolve around them - or did the rest of us just miss something?

A Moment of Truth:

I tried my hand at sales many years ago, selling timeshares with the Marriott of all things. Not only was I not enamored with my product and felt about as slimy as a slug in the dead of summer, but I found out I couldn’t stomach all of the “No’s”. You know, it wasn’t even all of the “No’s” either - it was the vitriol that spewed out of people’s mouths… like some busted pipe of venom. It was not a fun job and I knew that industry and sales was not for me.

So it takes a certain bravado, I suppose, to get through all of the objections customers may try and throw at you. I give you that.

But what I don’t get is how a simple process that has been proven to make your sale go smoother, make the the customer happy, and keep everyone sane can prove to be such dramatic show-stopper month-in-and-month-out?

Do you live in a high-touch environment where you service customers that are high-touch? It might not be sales people - it might be lawyers, doctors, or Ph. D.’s at a university. In other words, do you work in a place where “the talent” has to be coddled and pampered to maintain a certain order of things?

Balanced Chaos:

There has to be balance. In my previous post, Meet Me at the Intersection of Passion and Process, I waxed poetically about the fact that organizations need both passion and process. I used to believe only process was needed, but found that the coin of business had 2 sides.

It can be a death knell for a company to have all process and no passion. This leads to the company becoming disconnected to its lifeblood - the customer.

What is arguably more dangerous is to allow passion to override logic and a proven process and forge ahead on bravado and testosterone alone. The all too familiar syndrome of “over-promising and under-delivering” is the hallmark of this corporate culture.

In a high-touch environment, exceptions are the norm. However, you must have a system in place to allow for certain deviations from the critical path, but not allowing for wild variations that might cause the company, customer, or associates harm.

In other words, exceptions can be allowed to become the rule only when there is a culture of understanding when passion is warranted and when it must be reigned in, when process is needed and when it becomes stifling.

What are some of your thoughts on exception handling? How do you and your company deal with exceptions?

Walking a tightrope over a pit of hungry alligators while juggling flaming torches.

I work in a high-touch, sales-driven, customer-centric industry, company and position. This is the image that sums up my day on average.

How do you deal with a change of direction?

• Are you the type who quickly loses their temper when the “plan” quickly jumps the tracks, or do you find yourself knuckling down and rowing the rapids?

• Are you the kind of person who enjoys systems and processes, seeking order in the chaos?

• Do you look for the edges of the puzzle first and work your way in?

The job is not for everyone, that is for sure. It almost wasn’t for me; Let me tell you, it almost got me.

I spent the formative years of my career in very large organizations - the United States Marine Corps and a manufacturing division of a worldwide company with offices in the US and UK. So one of my employers was the 911 force of the world; I supported a 2000-Marine air group. The other was publicly traded company focused more on providing a 25 cent dividend to its shareholders each quarter than trying to increase revenue. Both were large, impersonal, and riddled with systems and processes just for their own sake.

The owner of my current company hired me some 5 years ago to bring focus to a group in  a company that had been successful “doing it the old school way”. My job was to seed in new ways of doing business while trying to work within the boundaries of almighty “culture”.

My job was to seed in systems and process in a company that ran by the seat of its pants: very little formalized process with lots of gusto and bravado.

I began by trying to hit the wall full-steam-ahead, and got one nasty concussion after another. After 2 years of hitting my head against the wall, and gaining inches not yards, I sat down. I opened my eyes, ears, and mind to some key mentors and learned how to work within the system.

It began working so well that something odd happened - the fire started to go out. The process began to take over and - where was the passion? Where was the fire in the belly I had loved about the company when I first started? In those years, I discovered that systems and process have their place, but not without passion and commitment to the people around you. In the Marine Corps, we had a saying,

It’s not the Corps that takes care of Marines, it’s the Marine standing next to you that takes care of you - and you that takes care of him.

And then it all began to click…

• Process is to bring sanity to the confusion, and offer consistency to your customers.

• Passion is to connect you with each other, and breeds loyalty from customers.

… and it is there where the magic is found - for me - for my company. Each of you may have your own recipe for success, but success for me is at the intersection of passion and process.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Corey Smith got me thinking about process and procedure. I thought about this a while and this is what I came up with in summary. Short, sweet, and to the point.

I suppose procedure was intended to franchise process, but as we all know franchises have never been credited with creativity - just pure productivity.

So which do you prefer, procedure or process? Creativity or productivity?

I just wrapped up the first read of a book a friend of mine gave me - called Raving Fans. This is book about turning good customer service into Raving Fan service. Here’s a quote that really struck me,

What we have are systems. Not rules. Rules create robots. Not systems. Systems are predetermined ways to achieve results. The emphasis has to be on achieving the result, not the system for the system’s sake. That’s the difference between systems and rules. With a rule the emphasis is on the procedure, not necessarily the result. We have rules about smoking within ten feet of a gasoline pump. We have systems for delivering service.

The purpose of of systems is to ensure consistency, not create robots. Rules do that. Our team members have to create the Raving Fanexperience for our customers every time. Systems give you a floor, not a ceiling…

I know I have been guilty of allowing a system to turn into a procedure, a rule rather than a reason why. You must understand that vision helps you keep perspective. Systems have to be flexible because the world is always changing whether you like it or not. The system helps you keep consistency and deliver a consistent service level - the system itself is NOT the service level; That is an important distinction.

Several years back, I know everyone always wanted more information and more data to make [insert adjective of choice here] decisions… Fast-forward a few years and just about everyone uses a search engine of sorts to find what they need in the mountain of data we are inundated with. What does that say about the amount of information we ingest on a weekly, daily, or even hourly? … ‘Google’ is now a verb!

I specialize in the managed print services (MPS) and document management solutions (DMS) spaces, and we always talk about discoveries as well as structured and unstructured data. Structured data is what most people are used to interacting with in the form of line of business (LOB) and database systems. Unstructured data is often the disparate file folders on servers and spread across the sea of corporate hard drives.

When interacting with all of the stakeholders in play at the various levels of our company and our clients’ companies, I often hear comments about how we need this information or should have that data. Sure, having the data is one thing, but is it meaningful to the company or our clients?

You see information is a tricky thing. If you don’t have enough the risk of making an ill-advised and/or unsupported decision is quite possible. However, there is an even more dangerous myth afoot in the world today; That is too much information is even worse.

Well how could too much information be a bad thing? Ever try drinking water from a fire hose at full blast? Exactly!

Our sensory perception allows us to take in quite a bit of information, process it, and make subsequent decisions or adjustments in order to achieve certain goals. Our minds can only handle so much information before it starts filtering out what it believes extraneous to allow us to focus on what is important. When I moved back from San Diego, the silence and still of a country night was maddening for a time; my mind had gotten use to all of the motion and action and took some time to ratchet back down.

With information hitting us from so many directions every day, to see a massive blob of numbers in rows and columns means absolutely nothing until our mind can process the information. So how do you dissect the data into manageable and usable information?

I won’t go into some of the more arcane methods of BI, but one easy way is to manage by exceptions. This goes back to having processes to manage your business. If you have flexible processes to manage your business you can watch for exceptions to your process and manage to those variances. Be cautious of the variances, and spend time investigating the ‘why?’ behind them; these will often lead you to discoveries of flawed processes. It is important to heed and fully understand the problems, and when realized move quickly and accurately to resolve them.

I just recently had the pleasure of meeting a new friend, Corey Smith, at ITEX, who runs the Master the Business blog, through a colleague of mine, Darrel Amy, who owns Dealer Marketing Systems. He wrote a rather interesting article on his blog that I was thumbing through called ‘Does change always equal ROI?’

I responded back with some thoughts of my own:

I firmly believe change is hard, and people generally only want change because they are unsatisfied with the current situation, but is the grass really greener on the other side?

Of course, this is a rhetorical question in the grander sense of this reply, but a question that should, nonetheless, be asked by those change agents within a business and really examined. It is my humble opinion that only two things should dictate change: 1) an internal desire to positively impact the business and 2) an external market pressure or development that dictates change to survive.

People by their very nature are experiential. This is to say that they must generally experience a great deal of pain or pleasure to enable the catalysts for change to take root. It is my submission that change only occurs in any form of permanence with the former as it takes an increasing amount of pleasure to perpetuate lasting change (see economics 101: the law of diminishing returns).

So in a nutshell, change for its own sake never succeeds, and you are dead-on in stating change can indeed be painful. However, it is that very vision of change from the leader given to the troops, and reinforced by line managers that keeps change on track - along with a good business plan of course!

What I would submit to you is change management can be positive, much quicker to realize ROI, and much less painful, even to the point of being positive, if you have spent the time building a culture that is high capacity and dedicated to the grander vision of a leader…

You must consistently remind people why we are changing, but most importantly, as a technologist and business process improvement advocate, I have found that gaining not only C-level buy-in but grass roots buy-in to be the real key. This is why my number 1 metric is always long-term cultural adoption.

Communistic you say? Not in the least. I have found that your associates can often tell you what is screwed up most in the business. Why is this? Because they are often closest to your customer… This is of course to say you have built a high-capacity team and that you have the right people on the bus — and in the right seats on the bus (to use a line from Jim Collins).

Culture is king and how change can be accomplished in both good and bad situations.

Regards,
Ken