Thursday, October 27, 2011

Why Lean in Sales?

By Pascal Dennis

Why indeed? Isn’t Lean a factory thing?

Well, no…

Lean is a business system comprising the entire enterprise.

The Toyota Business System, for example, addresses the three critical “loops”:
  1. Design
  2. Make
  3. Sell
Guess which one is considered most important? Sell – because it’s closest to the customer.

Sales are about information. What features does the customer want? At what price point? What promotions does he respond to? How does she want to receive her products or service?

How was our last promotion perceived? And so on...

Production (Operations), usually our most valuable & expensive asset, runs on information. We only make what our information tells us to make.

If our information is wonky, our most valuable asset is unlikely to operate in its sweet spot. Result: overproduction, inventory and all the associated ills.

So how do we introduce Lean in Sales?

Here are some questions to get you started:

  1. What is value in Sales? (Who are our internal & external customers and what do they need from us?)

  2. What is waste?

  3. What are some core mental models in our Sales department?

  4. What are our current processes for delivering this value?

  5. How aligned are they to delivering the value our customers expect?

  6. How do we improve them?

Lean is harder outside the factory – because our product & processes are typically invisible.

If you make scrap in a factory, everyone can see it. “Hey, we made a whole pile of junk yesterday…”

In business processes, by contrast, you can’t see the scrap. A good forecast & a bad forecast look identical…

On the plus side, sales folks are usually smart & creative. If you introduce the fundamentals with finesse, they run with them.

For more, check out The Remedy – Bringing Lean Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization, and our Lean Leadership Brain Booster suite.

That’s all for now.



  1. Lean in sales and marketing is where we have the opportunity to generate the clearest view of customer value. Right first time and just in time information on what delights our customers should be key to our success. If we guess or are too early or too late, value delivery will become a lottery. Make it visible, standardise, improve and start solving customer problems. Jobs and Dyson are great examples.

  2. Fine insights, David -- thanks.

    I'd add that Value in Sales/Mktg entails providing useful information -- so that we can make good decisions.

    Anything else, it's fair to say, is waste.

    How many sales & marketing organizations can clearly define their purpose, Value & Waste?

  3. I used to work in sales area and I found that concept of development of multi skill staff (like in work cell) help a lot. The example is that sales staffs who are crossed trained in other department (like finance,procurement,manufacturing) seems to make better sales pitch because they can anticipate customers's requirements better.

  4. Good insight, Ben -- thanks. Cross-training and versatility are an important countermeasure to delay in Sales & Mktg. Cross-training, of course, depends on having good standards for core processes.

    Problem is, such standards are often incomplete, or missing completely. A marketing executive once told me, "But we have no processes..."

    She was by no means a fool.

    So, we have to help our colleagues upstream and downstream of the factory grasp the fundamentals.