Overview of the Process

The Sales Conversion Process begins with contact with the customer and includes the activities to understand their requirements, present a solution (both in concept and to prove out), provide pricing proposals through to procuring the software and executing a PO. The Sales Process has not been traditionally included when mapping operations within an organization; thus, there are no defined metrics for the steps of the process. The PT and LT times shown are anecdotal and should be more formally assessed by “going to the gemba.”

Challenges

As a workforce, Sales reps are likely one of the hardest groups to map as many Sales Reps would argue that what they do is more art than science. Typically, Sales Reps have not been required to account for their time to any detail. This makes the Sales Process challenging in that there have not been any true time studies to use a foundation. The Sales Process needs to be studied at the process level, not at an individual customer level.

There are categories of waste within the areas of waiting, extra processing, correction, etc. Much of the process is manual, and likely to continue to be manual, which means you are relying on human action which is prone to error, distraction, etc. This is further support to study in detail.

Variability is a third challenge. The variability across reps (personalities and skills), customers, industries, and geographic locations makes it harder to determine what is value add and what is wasteful which will be critical in establishing a process on a large, repeatable scale. There is also variability in the execution of the process (what steps are taken, in what order, etc.) which causes variability in the process times.

Bottlenecks

Within Sales, the customer is heavily involved. There is a lot of external wait time spent waiting for the customer to respond, be available, etc. As an example, the Meeting noted is on average 2 hours; however, the elapsed time is 2 weeks. This time is waiting for the customer to respond and to find available time on their calendar that matches your own. Another example is the procurement process. At this point, the Sales Rep is waiting for the customer to complete their own procurement process. These are not controllable within the Sales Process and therefore contributes to the longer lead times.

The primary internal bottleneck has to do with the quote/proposal generation which is a very manual process. The Sales Rep creates the quote, submits it to a Pricer and then the Pricer reviews it to make sure that it meets specifications. If there is inaccurate or missing information, he will return the quote to be fixed. If not, he will process it and the quote will be generated and sent to the rep for customer delivery. For a pricer, the review can be as little as 10 minutes to days of back and forth with the Rep. There is variability in the types of bids being reviewed as well as volume due to time (end of month, end of quarter, etc.). It is not uncommon to have over 10 bids in their queue at a time and frequently working 3-5 bids at the same time. This is an area that contributes to the long delays but also is an area that could benefit from analysis to determine value add vs. wasteful steps.

Current State Highlights