Neil Rackham's Suggested Sales Practices During Recession

Neil Rackham is known throughout the world as a speaker, writer and seminal thinker on sales and marketing issues. Three of his books have been on the New York Times best seller list and his works have been translated into over 50 languages. 

 

Neil first gained international recognition in the 1970s when he led the largest ever research study of successful selling and sales effectiveness. This massive project, supported by major multinationals including Xerox and IBM, involved a team of 30 researchers who studied 35,000 sales calls in over 20 countries. The research took 12 years at a cost, in today’s dollars, of $30 million. From the results of these studies he published the groundbreaking classic SPIN® Selling.

I had the opportunity to attend the latest Neil Rackham's workshop in Mumbai. The workshop is an eye opener for people who are not exposed to value selling. For professionals or consultants who have been working in the area of TOC way of selling, it is very heartning to see the common message coming from one of the Guru's of Sales. However, unlike TOC, SPIN does not assume creation of a Decisive Competitive Edge and relies primarily on intelligent questioning for finding out the pain.

In the workshop, Neil spoke about Sales Strategies for the recessionary times. I am reproducing the key points:

• Don't chase business you can't win. Focus ruthlessly on your best and biggest opportunities
• Make your prospect feel safe about doing business with you. So build relationships, ask buyers about their concerns and really listen to their issues
• Negotiate little and negotiate late. Premature negotiation looses sale
• Do not defend your existing business. Treat existing customers as new business opportunities and sell assertively. Attack is the best defence.

 

Avenir sponsors manufacturing excellence seminar in Doha

Manufacturing Excellence Forum, Doha

Event Date: 5-6 Apr 2009
Location: Sheraton Doha Resort & Convention Hotel, Qatar

Avenir was invited to talk about TOC in the Manufacturing Excellence Forum organised by Marcus Evans in Doha, Qatar. The forum was attended by senior executives from various industry segments, coming from the Gulf and other parts of Asia. The event also had eminent speakers and practitioners of Lean and Six Sigma methodologies.

While a number of speakers extolled the virtues of Lean manufacturing to improve the operations of organisations, Mr. Sanjay Ghoshal and Mr. Prasun Chowdhury, the founding Directors of Avenir, shared with the audience, in a half day session, the power of Theory of Constraints (TOC) to generate exponential growth for organisations in a very short period of time.

Most of the participating companies already had implemented lean, Six Sigma in some form, but TOC was a new subject for them and therefore added a new dimension to the discussion framework. As opposed to pure Lean methodology, TOC gets both financial and operational results much faster and sometimes in a matter of weeks.

Speakers from Avenir impressed upon the audience that Theory of Constraints serves as a holistic approach to help organisations become ever flourishing; that it serves to focus Lean and Six Sigma initiatives on the Key constraints in the organizational system(s). Both speakers from Avenir shared real life cases where order of magnitude improvements in cycle time of production and delivery, reduction in work in process and finished goods inventory and reliability of supply had been achieved by the application of Theory of Constraints.

The common myth about TOC vs Lean was broken in Six Sigma. It was shared that, in TOC we force companies to use Six Sigma, but it is dependent on the specific nature “of the beast” This applies to companies wherein we use Lean techniques. Sanjay and Prasun related an experiment that was conducted in a large electronics contract manufacturing company in US. In some of the plants only Lean was implemented, some plants only Six Sigma was implemented, in the balance plants TLS i.e. Lean and Six Sigma implemented under the overall philosophy of TOC.

The results were collected over a period of two years and checks were made for statistical relevance. After the experiment, it was clearly established that the third set of plants where TLS was implemented did much better than the other plants.

At the end of the forum, a consensus emerged among the participants that TOC is possibly the most powerful management methodology today and is the evolution over Lean and Six Sigma.

The audience were also exposed to the Project Management vehicle of TOC, Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) that enables projects to finish within time and very often as much as 33% earlier than time. Given that Qatar and other parts of the gulf is witnessing rapid infrastructure and real estate development, the discussion on CCPM could not have come at a better time.

The session on TOC lasted for the better part of the second day of the seminar and was well appreciated by the knowledgeable audience. A number of companies approached the speakers from Avenir to explore how they could apply TOC in their organisations.

To know more about TOC and how Avenir exponentially increases profits of organisations, visit www.avenirco.com

Prasun Chowdhury

Sanjay Ghoshal