Sales Solution, as Taught by Eli Goldratt
Nine lessons that apply Eli Goldratt's way of thinking to sales. You follow Anil, who has been told to double the profit of an electricals company; Farida, a shopkeeper with no space and no money; Ganesh, a distributor who is also a businessman; and Neha, whose best salesperson spends 8% of his time selling.
- 9 lessons, about 192 minutes in all
- Free, no sign-up. Your progress is saved in this browser
- Certificate of completion when you pass all nine quizzes
- 1 Double the profitThe board wants profit doubled. There are only three doors, and two of them are nearly shut. Follow Goldratt's five steps to find what really limits sales, and why the person who walks into a shop is the constraint of a consumer business. 18 min
- 2 What the shopkeeper wantsEvery shopkeeper is limited by two things, space and money. Work through the retailer's return on investment, see why shops can only ask for more margin and more credit, and find the one lever the company controls that beats any scheme. 20 min
- 3 The speed of the shelfWhy must a shop hold stock at all, and which factor decides how much? Replenishment time turns out to drive all the others. See what ordering weekly and delivering in a day do to the shelf, and how the chain switches from push to pull. 18 min
- 4 An offer the shop can't refuseGoldratt's unrefusable offer, built for a shopkeeper: a fixed weekly visit, half a month of stock, a wider range and a take-back promise. Then what it takes on the ground for a few thousand salespeople to make that offer every week, and why the training must happen in the market, not in a classroom. 20 min
- 5 Winning the distributor“Sounds great, but I'll have to invest more. Why should I?” Use Goldratt's layers of resistance to get a distributor's buy-in: agree on the problem first, then on what a good solution must do, and only then present the offer and its four elements. 22 min
- 6 Conflicts in the marketSpecial prices for big shops or price discipline for all? Load the shelf or widen it? Visit every week or save the cost? Six conflicts that keep every channel stuck, with the assumptions on both sides, the ones that turn out false, and why schemes can never be the answer. 26 min
- 7 The salesperson's timeIn a B2B business the plant has capacity and the market is large, so what limits sales? The sales team's time, and almost none of it is spent selling. Define a sale, measure where the time goes, trace why the monthly target produces it, and draw the two conflicts that keep it that way. 22 min
- 8 Releasing sales capacityTake every task that doesn't need a salesperson away from the salespeople. A customer service desk with time buffers, inside sales on the phone, campaigns built on what operations can now promise, and dedicated business developers with a coordinator who fills their diary. Then the traps of dividing the work. 24 min
- 9 Managing sales without targetsFreed time doesn't sell by itself, and a monthly target pulls people straight back to the old habits. Review the enablers instead of the result, judge by “better than before”, manage tactics weekly, reward how well they are carried out, and start with a pilot. 22 min
- ✓Your certificateUnlocks when all nine quizzes are passed.
The thinking belongs to Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt: the five focusing steps, the conflict cloud, the unrefusable offer, the layers of resistance and his warning about how measurements drive behaviour. The way it is applied here, to channel sales and to a B2B sales team, follows how TOC practitioners have implemented it in the field. The story, the characters and the wording are mine; this is an independent course, not a product of the Goldratt organisation.