Releasing sales capacity

The single-window assumption

The previous lesson ended on one assumption: all customer-facing work must go through the same person. Neha’s team defended it hard.

Which tasks really need a salesperson?

Only a few tasks in the sales process need high skill: technical explanation, convincing a customer to buy, the final negotiation. Most of the rest, prospecting, taking appointments, preparing and sending offers, coordinating meetings, order status, payments, logistics, warranty claims, reports, need lower skill and can be done better by people who do only that. Specialisation raises productivity twice: through the learning curve, and through the end of multitasking across very different tasks.

Element 1: a customer service desk

All non-sales work moves to a central customer service desk:

• enquiry acknowledgement, quotations and price sanctions;
• sales order booking and order status;
• billing clearance and dispatch coordination, transporters and unloading at the site;
• payment follow-up and commercial documents;
• reports.

Each type of task gets a service level, a time buffer, and the desk works by colour priority, exactly like buffer management in a plant: every morning the supervisor assigns tasks to each person by colour, red first. A typical set of buffers:

Task	Time allowed	Clock starts at
Order booking full kit	2 days	purchase order confirmed by field sales
Delivery confirmation and manufacturing clearance	2 days	clearance date, six weeks before the due date
Delivery documents	7 days	system invoice
Payment follow-up	10 days	ten days before the contractual due date
Order status	1 day	customer’s query

Only exceptions, such as a seriously delayed payment, go back to the salesperson. Processes are standardised and templated, then automated. In practice one desk person can support about five salespeople.

Element 2: inside sales for existing customers

Existing customers still need frequent contact, but much of it doesn’t need a car. An inside sales team, on the phone, handles all enquiries from existing customers, calls them periodically for new orders, and schedules the field visits. Central calling gives a far higher frequency of contact; the field salesperson keeps what needs a human visit: application studies, demos, commercial discussions.

A campaign coordinator designs campaigns and decides which customers each one targets, a limited set at a time so the team isn’t flooded (work-in-process control, applied to selling). The best campaigns are built on what operations can now promise:

• Express delivery: standard smaller products from stock at the plant or branch within one to three days, for retail, small businesses and builders.
• Reliability programme: guaranteed delivery of bigger standard products in two to three weeks, so large customers can order late and don’t block their working capital.

Element 3: business development, with a coordinator

Winning new customers takes real effort: finding the right segment and the decision makers, getting on the approved vendor list, many meetings. If the existing salespeople must do it, the conflict from lesson 7 comes back. So the released capacity is used to dedicate people to business development.

Each business development manager does only face-to-face work: meetings, application studies, capability presentations, up to the enquiry stage, then hands over to sales. Behind each one sits a business development coordinator who:

• schedules appointments, aiming at four or five meetings a day;
• keeps the manager’s calendar booked for the next ten days;
• follows up for the next meetings;
• handles all the admin: tickets, stays, CRM entries, reports.

Entering early in a customer’s buying process, before the specification is frozen, means fewer enquiries lost on price, and the freedom to choose better orders, which raises throughput per sale. A channel manager does the same for dealers: market mapping, joint calls, dealer training, weekly reviews.

The traps of dividing the work

Division of labour raises productivity, but it has known failure modes. The teams that implemented it learnt them the hard way:

• Synchronisation. When work is divided, the ball gets dropped at handovers. One coordinator must schedule and synchronise the steps, and every handover needs clear criteria: what must be complete before the work passes on.
• Standard routing. When the person who plans the work is remote from the person who does it, similar opportunities must follow the same route: for every step, its input, who does it, its sequence and its deliverable.
• Exceptions. Defining the main flow isn’t enough. Unmapped exceptions become informal favours, and get forgotten.
• Real load. One team believed its developers were overloaded and removed task after task, but the problem persisted. Only when every request became a ticket could they see who was really overloaded and who wasn’t.
• A process manager. Specialists can work in a vacuum. Someone must make sure the process is followed, check the health of each opportunity and improve the flow.

And one rule from operations applies to sales unchanged. When a manager orders “pull orders ahead to bill them this month”, procurement re-schedules and loses synchronisation, capacity goes to the wrong orders, production flow is disrupted, and customers who were promised dates are let down. Month-end billing is bought with next month’s reliability.

Check your understanding

Answer all five. Get four right to complete the lesson.

1. The assumption that keeps salespeople buried in admin is…

• Customers are difficult and insist on dealing with one person
• The plant is slow
• Admin is unimportant
• All customer-facing work must go through the same salesperson

Break it, and capacity is released without hiring.

2. The customer service desk prioritises its work by…

• Time buffers and colour priority, red first
• Who shouts loudest
• Order value only
• First in, first out

Buffer management, applied to sales support.

3. A business development coordinator keeps the manager’s calendar…

• Empty for flexibility
• Full for the month
• Booked about ten days ahead, four or five meetings a day
• Shared with the customer, who books meetings directly

So the scarcest time is never idle or wasted on admin.

4. Express-delivery and reliability campaigns are an example of…

• Price competition through faster service
• An offer built on a capability competitors don’t have
• A scheme
• A loyalty programme

Operations’ improvement turned into a sales offer.

5. Why did one team need tickets for every request?

• For billing
• To find and punish the slow people in the team
• To see the real load on each person, which beliefs had got wrong
• For the customer

Without visibility, they kept fixing the wrong overload.