Sometimes we do a study that we call the “Span of Control” analysis, where we look at how many subordinates report directly to each manager in an organization. It’s a more difficult study than it sounds, because the way organizational charts are drawn is not always how they really are.
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Many industries experience “shoulder periods.” These are the time periods leading up to and away from the peak volumes. Figuring out how to manage these periods can be a difficult task for managers, but it’s also very important for realizing performance improvement gains.
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Over the years, one of the things we’ve noticed is that each new manager tends to create new reports, for whatever purpose they have at the time. Old reports are not eliminated, so over time there are a mountain of available reports – and a mountain of performance indicators — in the system.
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Growing sales volume with existing accounts is sometimes referred to as “increasing your share of wallet,” but it’s actually not a very good description — or even objective.
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Pricing is the most powerful way to improve profit without the need for large-scale culture change. It is often said that a 1% improvement in price is worth a 10% improvement in productivity.
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There are only two basic ways to increase your sales volumes: find more customers and/or sell more to existing customers. There is a little more complexity when you dig into the numbers…
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How to improve sales performance is a challenge for most businesses. Companies try many things to improve the average selling skills of their organization. They try training programs, special incentives, head hunters, one-on-one coaching, and sophisticated CRM systems.
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Management system changes often entail tightening up the planning standards that are used to schedule the operations, and then providing managers with tools to control, monitor and report on attainment to the plan.
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Implementing change requires re-configuring processes – and modifying the management systems and behaviors that need to accompany them. But as anyone who has ever tried to instill change knows, maintaining those gains can be very difficult
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It’s not easy for any operation to go through a performance improvement change. Consultants love to say that people should: “Work smarter, not harder,” but that can be a false dichotomy.
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