The Sales Role in a Lean Enterprise

The Role of Sales and Marketing is changing in every organization. The success of Lean on the operational side has influenced management to seek the same culture across the entire organization to include sales and marketing. They aspire for a true Lean Enterprise. How, do you achieve this? Do the principles of continuous improvement and Read More …

Share a Vision, Create a Sale

Think of all the things we need to deal with in sales: Present and future priorities Problems and Needs Gains and Opportunities Relationships and Influencers Technical Opinions People and Resources Money and Budget allocations Upcoming Schedules This list is just the tip of the iceberg, and all these are continuously changing. Salespeople have to be Read More …

Is TWI a Strength-Based Approach?

When I think about Training within Industry (TWI), I think of a method of incremental training. You don’t go out and try to train everyone at once, but you work on Methos, Relationships and Instruction.  I asked Bob Petruska, the author of Gemba Walks for Service Excellence: The Step-by-Step Guide for Identifying Service Delighters, a Read More …

If They Don’t Invite You till 60% – Show Up Early

Research from Google and CEB titled The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing provides new insight into buyer behavior, and it challenges the conventional wisdom. According to the study, customers reported to being nearly 60 percent through the sales process before engaging a sales rep, regardless of price point. – Forbes We have heard this many Read More …

The Origin of Customer Think

Bob Thompson is founder and CEO of CustomerThink Corporation which includes being editor-in-chief of CustomerThink.com, the world’s largest online community dedicated to helping business leaders develop and implement customer-centric business strategies. In a short podcast, edited out of last weeks podcast (either Bob or I talked to long) What It Really Means To Be Customer Read More …

Using Lean Tools, Start at Gemba

The tools are always an important element of any process and Lean Product Development is not lacking in offering its share. Out of what may seem like 100 different tools, I think the most prevalent can be broken down to the following (I have excluded your traditional project management tools): Gemba Walks Mapping (Which we Read More …