"Manufacturing" New Business

An effective, easy-to-use sales automation or CRM system makes it convenient now to use a simple idea, the assembly line, as an initial model to "manufacture new business", which implies a sales organization that can measurably, consistently and predictably produce revenue.

Salesforce.com's outbound teleprospecting team calls into F2000 companies to generate new sales opportunities for the field salespeople. The team uses a methodical, "assembly line" approach to produce consistent results.

Below are the assembly line stages used to organize prospective companies and move them through the prospecting process. These stages track the status of any targeted company, and are separate but complementary to your sales process stages. Sales process stages only apply to companies in the "5 - Active Opportunity" stage.

I'll find a way to publish a graphic illustrating the flow, but here's the assembly line:

"Queued Up"
1 - Cold (The universe of untouched, inactive accounts)
2 - Targeted (The next small batch of top-ranked accounts ready to be processed)

"Actively Working" (Moving Along Assembly Line)
3 - Researching (Is there a busines fit? Who are the decision makers?)
4 - Qualifying (Qualify decision maker interest, pain, timeframe, etc.)
5 - Active Opportunity (The field salesperson is now point person on the account)
6 - Current Customer

"Reject Bins"
7 - Developing Opportunity (Probable opportunity in 3-12 months, revisit later)
8 - No Current Opportunity (No opportunity in next 12 months)
9 - Bad Business Fit (Waste of time)

Stages 1-2:
These are simply buckets to hold accounts waiting to be worked on.

Stages 3-6:
As a salesperson makes defined progress with an account, they move the account through simple, measurable stages. I can run reports on their "Work In Progress" to see if each sales representative has enough companies in their pipeline to make their targets.

For example, an outbound sales development rep should have, at any one time:
"Cold + AE Targeted" Accounts: 300-500
"Prospecting" Accounts: 40-50
"Qualifying" Accounts: 10-15

Output per month:
This process generates 8-10 new opportunities per month for quota-carrying account executives. A high performing sales rep can generate 15 new opportunities, and one actually generated almost 30! (Which wasn't a fluke - he did it three months in a row). I'll do a future post on how.

Stages 7-9:
These are "holding bins" for "defective parts" that fell off the assembly line during processing. Periodically they are 'fixed' and put back on the line for re-processing.