Sales process engineering

Not to be confused with sales engineering.

Sales process engineering is the systematic design of sales processes done in order to make sales more effective and efficient.^[1]

It can be applied in functions including sales, marketing, and customer service.^[1]

History

As early as 1900–1915, advocates of scientific management, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Harlow Stafford Person, recognized that their ideas could be applied not only to manual labour and skilled trades but also to management, professions, and sales. Person promoted an early form of sales process engineering. At the time, postwar senses of the terms sales process engineering and sales engineering did not yet exist; Person called his efforts "sales engineering".^[2]

Corporations the 1920s through 1960s sought to apply analysis and synthesis to improve business functions. After the publication of the paper "If Japan Can... Why Can't We?", the 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of a variety of approaches, such as business process reengineering, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, and Lean Manufacturing.

James Cortada was one of IBM's management consultants on market-driven quality. His book TQM for Sales and Marketing Management^[3] was the first attempt to explain the theory of TQM in a sales and marketing context. Todd Youngblood, another ex-IBMer, in his book The Dolphin and the Cow (2004)^[4] emphasized "three core principles": continuous improvement of the sales process, metrics to quantitatively judge the rate and degree of improvement, and a well-defined sales process.^[4] Meanwhile, another executive from IBM, Daniel Stowell, had participated in IBM's project known as the "Alternate Channels Marketing Test." The idea was to incorporate direct response marketing techniques to accomplish the job of direct salespeople, and the initiative was quite successful.^[5]

Paul Selden's "Sales Process Engineering, A Personal Workshop"^[6] was a further attempt to demonstrate the applicability of the theory and tools of quality management to the sales function.

Rationale

The sales decision process is a formalized sales process companies use to manage the decision process behind a sale. SDP "is a defined series of steps you follow as you guide prospects from initial contact to purchase."^[7]

Reasons for having a well-thought-out sales process include seller and buyer risk management, standardized customer interaction during sales, and scalable revenue generation. Approaching the subject from a "process" point of view offers an opportunity to use design and improvement tools from other disciplines and process-oriented industries.^[8]

Relationship to other methodologies

Sales process engineering is distinct from, yet related to, several other business improvement and sales methodologies. Its primary distinction is a focus on designing and improving the overall, repeatable system of selling, rather than focusing on individual skills or techniques.^[9]

Business process improvement

Sales process engineering applies the principles of business process re-engineering and quality management, historically used in operations and manufacturing, directly to the sales function.^[10]

• Six Sigma: Like Six Sigma, sales process engineering aims to reduce process variability and defects to create more predictable outcomes. While Six Sigma identifies and eliminates defects in manufacturing to improve product quality, sales process engineering identifies and eliminates inefficient activities or failure points in the sales cycle to improve forecast accuracy and conversion rates.^[11]
• Total quality management: The methodology shares philosophical roots with TQM, which advocates for continuous improvement and customer focus across all of an organization's functions. Sales process engineering can be seen as a formal application of TQM principles to the specific domain of sales.^[12]

Sales techniques

Sales process engineering is distinguished from sales techniques or methodologies that guide a salesperson's behavior during customer interactions. If sales techniques are about how an individual salesperson sells, sales process engineering is about designing the framework in which they sell.

For example, methodologies like solution selling or consultative selling focus on training salespeople to act as advisors who diagnose customer needs and recommend solutions.^[13] These are skill-based approaches that exist within the larger, structured framework defined by sales process engineering. An engineered sales process would define the stages, criteria, and activities required (e.g., "Needs Assessment Stage"), while the consultative selling technique would be the method the salesperson uses to execute that stage effectively.^[10]

See also

• Sales management
• Theory of constraints