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| Testimonals and Reviews
Integrated Sales Process Management Book Reviews Business Process Trends Review: Michael Lodato has written a couple of interesting articles for BPTrends on sales process management. Now, he has published a book that provides sales managers with an integrated methodology for improving how your sales organization works.
Reviewed by Paul Harmon
An Excerpt
There are lots of process books that talk about the use of business process methods in production environments, lots of books on back office automation, and, recently, on supply chain improvement. There have been few books on analyzing and improving sales or marketing processes. Thus, Dr. Michael Lodato’s new book, Integrated Sales Process Management, is especially welcome.
Lodato focuses primarily on the processes by which managers manage sales and marketing activities. Thus, he focuses on planning and setting goals and on monitoring activities and controlling the results. As Lodato suggests “There is pressure to adopt sales automation, but there isn’t much evidence of its improving sales effectiveness. If you want to improve our competitiveness you may need to change the behavior of your salespeople by focusing on the processes that run the business. You can’t change the behavior without changing the processes and expecting that they are being followed.”
In other words, Lodato has written a book designed to help sales managers build an integrated system of sales and marketing management processes. He has a chapter on selling, but it’s a small part of the book and it’s the least process oriented. Lodato’s real focus is on the managerial processes that structure and control the sales activities.
A quick glance at the table of contents of Integrated Sales Process Management will confirm its focus.
1. Sales Management Overview
2. The Product Marketing Management Process
3. The MASTER Method of Personal Selling
4. Sales and Marketing Planning
5. Introduction to Integrated Sales Process Management
6. Sales Cycle Management
7. Managing Sales Opportunities
8. Sales Process Management
9. Sales Forecasting
10. Territory Management
11. Account Management 12. Integrated Channel Management
13. Management of Salespeople
14. Increasing Salesperson Performance
Lodato is definitely a systems thinker. He recommends process, and talks about how you could apply process techniques in different specific areas of sales. His methodology, if he can be said to offer one, is to analyze sales and marketing management activities using process techniques. More important, he brings together a huge amount of valuable information that any manager responsible for a sales organization is going to need to consider as he or she develops sales processes. Anyone who is interested in field sales or marketing processes and is considering how to define and measure them within a large organization would profit from Lodato’s detailed discussion of the management processes required to run a quality field sales or marketing operation.
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Paul Harmon is the Executive Editor of Business Process Trends (www.bptrends.com). He is a recognized BPM analyst and the author of Business Process Change.
Copyright © 2006 Business Process Trends. All Rights Reserved. www.bptrends.com
Reviewed by Eddie Gloyne
I can speak from experience about the value that Michael Lodato’s new book can be to sales and marketing executives facing challenges of doing business today. I met him when I became Sales Vice President of 3D Systems, a provider of very sophisticated products to the manufacturing industry. For about 18 months the company had experienced a very significant slowdown in the rate of sales. Our new CEO, Art Sims, knew of Lodato’s 20 years of developing and applying structured business processes to solve such problems and invited him to help us. After a brief study, we all agreed that we needed to restructure and re-enginethe entire sales process.
We concluded that the effectiveness of our sales organization could be permanently improved when selling was defined as a set of processes and that the processes, once defined, can be managed, measured and improved. We weren’t looking for a band-aid. I remember Lodato telling us that “the winners in the increasingly competitive business environment of the future will differentiate themseves - not only in what they offer, but how they offer it. The sales process will become a competitive advantage" And it certainly did for us. Not only did the effectiveness of our sales force improve significantly, we saw similar results from our sales channel partners after we installed the processes at each of their companies. This would not have been as successful as we would have liked if Lodato’s integrated processes had not been as concise, portable, practical, and tailorable to the organization and culture of each of our manufacturing representative partners. Where the existing culture is loose, the processes need to be more informal. That need was anticipated in Lodato’s methodology. We were able to seamlessly integrate our sales and marketing management processes with processes to manage our channel partners. We used the same approach for both. We provided each of them with their own sales management manuals and training - much in the same way that today’s purchaser of the Integrated Sales Process Management (ISPM) book might provide copies to its channel partners as a tool for increasing their sales effectiveness. You will get the most benefit from this if you provide training as we did. We found that ISPM brings a high level of control to the sales and marketing effort - more control than was previously imagined. The confidence gained by the executive team in the short and long term sales forecasting and results was fundamental in ramping the growth of the company from a stagnant position to a 300% growth in revenues within 4 years.”
The ISPM book is actually more comprehensive than what we received from the author. It covers management as a process, personal selling, product marketing management process, sales and marketing planning, sales management, channel management, and people management. I find the material easy to read and understand. It seems that great care has been taken to explain the basic concepts in a step-by-step pragmatic “here’s how to do it” fashion. The book presents a new model for managing sales that speaks to the needs of everyone in the sales organization - from executives to managers to salespeople to sales support people. It links theory to practical application. The processes in the book are so well articulated that a software developer would find it an excellent model for the development of a sales process automation (SPA) system. If I were not retired, I might be tempted to bring such a system to market. Since the author believes that coaching is the raison d’etre of a sales manager, he has taken great care to provide coaching guidelines so managers can help salespeople be the best they can be. In the mid 1990s, a case study was published by the Anderson School of Management at UCLA describing the application of the ISPM methodology at 3D Systems Inc. The study reported significant increases in revenues and attributed the gains to the adoption by 3D Systems of the “structured sales process” designed by the author. A final point may be the most important. That is that the author stresses the importance of managing the interactions among the various management processes. And so, throughout the book, he uses the terms Integrated Sales Management (ISM), Integrated Territory Management (ITM) and Integrated Channel Management (ICM) and recommends their implementation to seamlessly integrate the product marketing strategy, the sales and marketing tactics, and the sales and marketing management processes. Eddie Gloyne
Sales Vice President (Ret.)
3D Systems Incorporated
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Reviewed by Maxwell R. Anderson - appearing on Amazon.com Great Descriotion of How a Productive Sales Organization Should Function, March 16, 2010 I just started my first job working in a sales department and one of my first projects was to help with lead management. I knew nothing about lead management or sales processes in general, so I did a lot of research and fortunately, I stumbled upon this book (Integrated Sales Process Management, A methodology for improving sales effectiveness in the 21st Century.). I soon learned that lead management was just a tiny part of good sales process management. After reading this book, I went from not knowing what sales processes were to making recommendations to my mnagers on how to improve our sales processes that are alrready having a positive effect. It's practical, thorough, and easy to understand. I'm already seeing results from paracticing just a couple small things outlined in the book, and I'm looking forward to putting more of these recommendations into practice in the future. For you sports fans out there, Dr. Lodato is very good at using sports analogies to drive home points about how sales organizations should develop and rely on sound sales process management if they want to abe successful. If you work in sales and you feel that your sales department is underachieving, chances are it has more to do with your underlying sales processes than anything else. Give this book a read and apply some of the methods inside, and you'are very likely to see things begin to turn around. ============================================================================================= A Testimonial for Management of New Product Launches and Other Marketing Projects. July 11, 2009 Greetings Michael, I just finished reading your book “Management of New Product Launches and Other Marketing Projects”, and I wanted to take a moment to express my appreciation for producing such a valuable resource. I’m currently in the process of organizing a new product launch for one of my clients, and your book is the only resource I’ve been able to locate (ANYWHERE) that satisfies my need for a logical perspective to the processes involved. Although I’m fascinated by the mechanics of disciplined project management, I’ll be the first to admit that my strengths are more closely related to the creative side of marketing. And even though I’ve read several books on project management, yours is the first I’ve seen that really resonates with my approach to marketing tasks and workflow. So thank you Michael for sharing your knowledge and experience. I look forward to applying the information to my current project, and the profound impact it will undoubtedly have on future projects as well. Sincerely, Tony Curless Tony Curless | AFTERMARKETING, LLC Marketing and Advertising Services for the Automotive Aftermarket
22835 NE 14th Street, Sammamish, WA 98074 tonycurless@msn.com | tel 425.836.4072 | fax 425.868.0795 =========================================================== Selling Big Ticket Items Reviews and Testimonials Master Method Works, May 25, 2006
Reviewer: Sol Chooljian (Camarillo, CA USA) I am an independent consultant specializing in Product Marketing. I always have to interact with sales people in order for my engagements to succeed. Michael Lodato's manual has been a key to showing front line sales people and executives the practical methods that they can use to assure sales success. The presentation links theory with proven sales tactics and is written as a personal dialog between the author and hardworking salespersons who have to "make their quota" each day.
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