Info Blizzard
Causes Systemic
Sales Slowdown

"Can You Fix My People?"

The Senior VP/Sales of a Fortune 50 company called us one day. His sales force was having trouble in the field. "My major customers are complaining about how boring we are. I think we need some training." Before agreeing with him, we asked to do an assessment of his situation.

Culture Causes Clogs

Our first step was to go to the end. We started interviewing sales people in the field. They showed us what they were dealing with: dozens of pages of marketing materials sent each month; created by committees, reviewed by lawyers, re-written at the last moment. In short, the Phone Book. On average, these key account managers were spending 20 hours per month re-hashing materials sent to them by headquarters. Multiply that number by 150 managers, times the number of working days, and you will see 1 working year's worth of hours gone in 6 weeks!

You Can't Deliver The Phone Book

We advised the client against a "training program". Yes, the sales people would need the skills necessary to create stories out of raw data, but that wasn't enough. We asked to intervene instead at the pressure point of information flow. We gave the marketing people the tools and guidance they needed to build clear and concise sales materials. We made suggestions on how to improve the decision cycles so that there were less last minute changes. We got the "phone book" down to a short story.

A work in progress. But so far, hundreds of hours saved each year.