First, the deal size, the money value of the transaction. “In the food service industry, deal size is often called the average ticket. In retail it might be sales per customer visit,” explains the author.

The second way is to work on ‘sales velocity’; that is, “how fast sales opportunities move through your sales pipeline or how many flow through in any given period of time.” For big-ticket sales, this is usually measured by the number of days in a sales cycle, but velocity is also determined by the number of opportunities you can manage simultaneously at any given time, says Stinnett. “If you sell in a flow environment – where you customer commits to buying a predetermined quantity of products from you each month – it could be referred to as sales volume.”

And the third, ‘sales predictability’, also known as closure or success rate, is “the number of opportunities that you expect to come to closure compared to the number that actually do close when you expected them to.” Predictably, predictability is a function of the quality of forecasts.

The author calls for making these three variables KPIs (key performance indicators) to gauge the results of sales efforts, “because every increase in gross revenue is a direct result of an improvement in one of these three measures.”

However, the three objectives can sometimes be at odds with one another. For instance, “a bigger deal often moves through your pipeline slower, not faster. Managing more deals spreads your sales resources thinner and could have a negative impact on predictability.”

So, what should you do? Use your best judgment, advises Stinnet. For, that way, you would know “when to try to make a deal bigger versus taking a smaller deal off the table sooner as well as how to invest your time to maximise your results.”

Result-oriented read.

Towards ‘lean’

Lean Solutions
James P. Womack & Daniel T. Jones

The consumer’s dilemma in the current century is not merely about an increasing number of consumption decisions to make, in the face of a barrage of categories of products and suppliers. A more important problem is that the boundary between consumption and production is getting blurred with “the evolution of the production process, facilitated by information technology and the steady introduction of more personal capital goods,” which claims more of the c onsumer’s unpaid time!

As a result, “most consumers will actually have less useful time and energy in the years ahead,” foresee James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones in Lean Solutions ( www.crosswordb ookstores.com). They rethink, therefore, consumption from the first principles as a process (like production, but from the opposite direction), and strike upon lean consumption, and then match it with lean provision (“firms must provide the goods and services consumers actually want, when and where they are wanted without burdening the consumer”). A win-win-win is possible, the authors assure, when providers, employees and consumers create lean solutions together.

Well argued.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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