The business world is increasingly like a business village. Boundaries are seemingly blurred.

The new generation of digi-creative entrepreneurs are so in touch and inspired by new trends from other continents.

Governments around the World are funding technology start up ventures and are actively encouraging established businesses to expand overseas….in the hope of stimulating their local economy.

International legal harmonisation and e-commerce regulation is happening much faster than ever before.

With this in mind, one wonders why one still meets companies that only just want to trade in their home, native market….It is probably because they have been badly burnt in the past or know of companies that have badly burnt by an export misadventure.

Dynamic, ambitious technology companies surely need to write global business plans from day one, even if international roll out does not take place until year 3 or 5.

Multinationals now frequently source best practice work methods from emerging countries. The USA, Japan and leading European economies no longer have a monopoly of breakthrough patented technology.

UKTI, International banks (like HSBC), Accountancy and Law Firms can provide guidance on trading in every country in the World.. Transaction Focus and other practical sales and marketing partners can now rapidly plan, set up and implement sustainable revenue generating sales and marketing plans.

Yes, most export markets are different and different verticals require different approaches.

British companies often prefer to initially expand into Commonwealth countries, that have similar legal framework and cultural understanding.

US companies often opt to initially sell into Canada and then branch out into the UK or Ireland as a springboard for Europe….This is more of a “comfort zone” step by step approach ..rather than a long term, analytical SCOPE focussed strategy.

A Norwegian oil service technology might sell better into Nigeria or Alaska rather than into neighbouring Scandinavian countries.

A global view is key. It is simply about searching best fit global clients and markets through out the World. Engaging alliance partners with international reach should be looked into.

A Global strategy Planning Workshop is a good place to start.

Test Selling and Test Marketing in new territories is also a wise way to go.

ABOUT COLLABORATIVE CO-MANAGEMENT

Cisco and Citrix announced recently that they were reducing their consultant count.

Outsourcing has received bad press with the G4S Olympics errors.
What blend of outside support do enterprises now need to gel their teams together and drive a healthy balance of more short term revenue and long term sustainable growth.

Outsourcing should surely be viewed as a long term venture to extend the brand influence of a product or service….not just as a cost reduction exercise to keep shareholders happy.

Junior outsourced personnel delivering a simple back office task in The Philippines or India should ideally understand the wider vision and mission of the outsourcer.

Bosses in Corporate America and Europe probably all too often overlook how back or front end outsourcing operators can improve the business process and even provide breakthrough insights …even help on the way to discovering innovations.

Lead associates at Transaction Focus have worked for many years in end outsource delivery markets. We understand what makes the locals tick in each market.

Cooperation and wholehearted commitment from outsource delivers is central to a successful outsourcing project.

In order to tap into outsourcing partners’ creative potential , they should first of all buy in to the brand values and feel that they are part of the organisation; i.e. they should not merely feel like a remote low value extension of their client business.

Outsourcers need to start co-sharing with outsourced deliverers. ..in a more equal, cooperative way.
Co-sharing ideas and discussing improved practices in a creative way will reap dividends.

The Short term cost cutting is here to stay…The John Lewis Group or Innocent Drinks model is yet to be delivered in outsourced markets.

It would not surprise me if Tata or a Filipino owned outsourcing operation cracks the winning collaborative formula with reverse sourcing into the American or European markets.

Major Western outsourcers are arguably too corporate, inflexible and self important.

Written by Charles Smee :- Founder and CEO or Transaction Focus

CONTROL AND BRANDING NEEDS TO CONCENTRATE ON THE TERMINOLOGY AND POWER OF ‘THE CLIENT’

Is the branding of oursourcing missing the marketing tenet of customer focus?
Is a re-alignment of values likely to help us steer to sunnier outlooks for future outsourcing harmony?

Has “Outsourcing” become a dirty word? Time for a re-brand? ‘Is it time to rebrand outsourcing’. However, perhaps the unasked questions are:
• ‘If we change the term ‘outsourcing’, what then the implications for co-sourcing and insourcing terminology?’
• ‘Is it time for outsourcing companies to consider raising their brand image AND customer service standards?’

About Outsourcing Standards
The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) is the professional association for the outsourcing industry, and was created by the Outsourcing Standards Board (OSB) in 2005. The standards cover these six areas:
• Professional responsibility
• Professional representation
• Accountability for outcomes
• Professional development
• Outsourcing advocacy
• Issue resolution

Roles in the outsourcing arena
The ‘players’ or roles in outsourcing are one of the following:
• Outsourcers who supply or have supplied services to companies. These often seem to get the blame, rightly or wrongly because they deliver the brokered service but are they too constrained to be able to construct and deliver a quality service for the price? Are the risks to them and the client potentially too large or is the vision of a perpetual motion machine just too alluring? Is there time to properly consider needs and wants or an overriding financial demand to just sign up for the next cheapest offer presented on the table and an ever downward driven cost model and hang sustainability, ethics and management responsibility because it’s too complicated and unpopular?
• Professionals who advise outsourcers, advise potential clients seeking to outsource or buy in supplier services. The IAOP has developed a qualification, ‘Certified Outsourcing Professional’ (COP) proving that they meet or exceed the IAOP standards relevant to their role. Are these power brokers the individuals with the upper hand always? Do they/we win no matter what, selling outsourcing if that’s the flavour of the day, and insourcing if it’s not?
• Clients or ‘outsourcing customers’ are companies that seek or have sought outsource solutions typically to their business service or IT services. They appear to be at the bottom of the heap, no longer ‘waiting for whatever a consultant threw into the air to look for the pretty pattern the chaos makes on landing’ as one colleague put it, but ‘digging furiously to evade the …. Personally – that or running like hell.’ Some may be cosseted and comforted, praised and cagouled into wearing a ‘suit of clothes’ but, like the emperor as yet oblivious to the comments of those who have a more realistic view. But who, another colleague sagely pointed out, wants to be the whistleblower who states the obvious? How will the emperor feel? How about the public perception in today’s age? At the ‘bottom’ of the heap, they have no control, no power and can’t hear the din of catastrophe until its too late and, what the heck, a new emperor/CEO can always emerge from pupation when the old one dies. To turn this around and squeeze suppliers not customers and still make decision making easy, I advocate, this customer focus should be on top. After all, they are the ones spending money and most likely to feel pain otherwise.

Standards focused on each role
• The IAOP is DIRECTIONAL from OUTSOURCER TO CLIENT. This is also common to APRA the Australian standards board, ISO is under development TC259: ISO/NP 37500 Outsourcing and is linked to the social responsibility guidance ISO 26000:2010 Social Responsibility, which as guidance, cannot be certified.
• The FBI outsource fingerprint, laboratory and even security work to an extent. They identify ‘channelers’ as third parties who broker confidential information in both directions. Perhaps this term could be more widely used to describe brokers of outsourcing agreements and the transmission of services and products or components.
• ISO 13485:2003: Maintaining Control of Outsourced Processes which deals with manufacturing, is one of the few DIRECTIONAL from CLIENT TO OUTSOURCER, though it talks about the recipients being ‘organisations’ because of potential confusion with their clients, who, incidentally, are often denied the right to know which parts of services are outsourced for commercially sensitive reasons.

In all cases, the global standards that ought to determine how we do business internationally seem to be at best new and at worst, in fact not at all as global as perceived by most from the word ‘global’. In fact the current ISO 37500 in construction, only has 13 countries that have signed up to it by mid 2012.

For almost all these cases, ‘client’ is not only confusing, it is seen as subservient to and even perhaps demeaning relative to the providers of outsourcing services in terms of control.

Terminology and power for the entire outsource buying marketplace – the missing standard and brand
As far as we are aware, there is no overarching widely accepted term for the recipient of outsourced services nor is there an organisation representing these disparate organisations such that they can wrestle control back to them; this in an environment where perceived and unfortunately often the actual level of service and / or customer experience, especially in outsourced BPO and IT Services, falls short of what the ‘clent’ and the poor ‘end client’ anticipates. So far gone is this control, that it is the butt of many jokes and the pride of many organisations branding that they do not outsource this type of service and so regard their offering as superior in some way. Whilst organisations choosing to band together in their normal peer groups such as National Association of Local Councils (NALC) and The NHS Trusts’ Association in the public sector and perhaps the Institute of Directors (IoD) and Chambers of Commerce to name but a few in the public sector, do have more influence than individual in creating changes for improved services and standards, they do not have the power that a truly national outsourcing recipient association or council body could have, let alone an ambitious global one.

So, control and branding needs to concentrate on the terminology and power of ‘the client’, else ‘customer focused outsourcing’ is so much hot air, it is will be prone to el nino effects outside our control. ‘Outsourcing’ need not be a dirty word causing disasters in any organisation that employs it. We go on holiday to sunny climates for rest, recuperation and shared warmth – somewhere with better and unique food and total experience than we have at home, and similarly, potential outsource clients seeking the best outsourcing agreements in the right countries at the right time should be entitled to the best they can afford working in a sustainable manner. In time or by intention, they may seek a more long term holiday home in that country and establish even closer ties with proven outsourcers.

It is not just about making outsourcing easier, but about making it more cost efficient, a relationship more in control and better for all, whatever the weather.

Deborah Stevens, Technical Communicator and Proprietor of Clever Resourcing
And Associate at Transaction Focus

DOES YOUR BUSINESS REALLY NEED A SALES DIRECTOR

Background
—————-

Traditionally, the process of obtaining sales in many businesses was a mechanical exercise which required a costly and cumbersome layered management structure with Sales Directors sitting at the apex of a large pyramid and treated as important members of the board.
Often they owe their position to earlier sales prowess in the field or to being in the right place at the right time and thus “making their mark”.
Frequently as a company grows and attracts enquiries and website visitors, Sales Directors can effectively “Hoover Up” the best leads for themselves and their chosen favourites and thus appear to be delivering stellar performance whilst basking in the reflected glory of others.
Since no one else in the company tends to look at what business would have come in any way, it is easier for companies to go on paying these people huge salaries and bonuses for producing holograms and mirages rather than analysing what individual sales people actually produce which in many cases is little more than pontification , self aggrandisement and self justification.

Lack of profitability / indifferent ROI
———————————————-

Figures from the Management Consultancy Group PLC show that sales forces are only 10% productive and only 1 salesperson in 250 consistently reaches their targets each month or commission reporting period.
This means that each salesperson is working 1/2 day a week and the rest of the time is driving, eating, drinking, schmoozing, sitting in waiting rooms ,writing proposals, attending sales meetings with their managers, being counselled, making appointments, doing paperwork, researching or surfing the net, being trained, on Away Days, being motivated, learning sales tracks etc..
In charge of all this is the Sales Director who supposedly formulates sales strategy yet is responsible for orchestration of sales activity to eventually produce lacklustre performance in terms of both profitability and ROI.

Other Directors Pulling their Weight/Sales Directors “asleep on the job”..??
—————————————————————————————————–

A Finance Director or Managing Director who allowed their remits to produce at this level would be dismissed and a Chief Executive who performed at this sort of level would soon be given full marching orders by the Institutional Shareholders yet Sales Directors are allowed to get away with it year after year whilst still drawing their full salary and earning bonuses to boot.

The New Sales Paradigm
———————————–

Today’s salespeople have to be good at relationship building, probably need to be marketing savvy, learn SPIN,PSS and NLP and need to have the skills to be self directed and psychologically self contained.
Selected and trained properly they can and should manage themselves and be both measurable and self directed.
This is a trend occurring in many other professions with nurse practitioners taking over the work load of doctors, administrators operating in self managed teams and non core functions such as law, HR, audit, cleaning, facilities management, leasing of company cars, marketing fulfilment, advertising, printing, call centres, software maintenance, computer hardware maintenance and insurance all being outsourced to external providers.
Salespeople should manage themselves, concentrate on profitable sales and report to the board with Finance Directors taking control through the use of performance dashboards with the facility to drill down to an individual salesperson.
Sales Directors need be cost and ROI justified.
Financial, Commercial or Marketing Directors can in many companies assume the above role and supercede the Sales Director.

The New Norm
———————

Today’s sales operation has to earn its keep in what is likely to be a decade of austerity for all businesses, especially those businesses that are not in export or counter cyclical markets.
Businesses need to be stripped of unnecessary costs and become more lean (less hierarchical), mean, agile and adaptable with the ability to scale up and down at will.
More and more sales can and do come through the new channels which include the web, mobile telephone applications, tablets, PDA,s, Mesh Technology and b2b applications of Social Media such as Linked In and Twitter.
Some sales directors can be trained to utilise and manage new and fast evolving marketing technology that facilitates the sales process, but this is expensive.
In order to be truly cost effective, sales persons must justify their existence by bringing in much larger ticket and complex sales than was the case before.
Command and Control is not the way to manage this new breed of self directed salesperson although traditional UK management styles may well need to alter to accommodate the new realities which could well include larger salaries and benefits resulting from the reallocation of what was once all or part of the Sales Director’s package amongst the Directors who remain.

Outsourced Sales and Sales Optimisation
———————————————————-

At Transaction Focus we can either gradually replace all or part of your sales operation within a flat, cost efficient structure with no Sales Director and no sales managers of any kind.
Alternatively, we can optimise sales performance through OODA Loop, TOC, Eastern Methodologies such as Hoshin Planning and Kaizen and then build on it through Value Stream Mapping, Training, Benchmarking, Psychological conditioning, Refined bid processes, NLP,Six Sigma/Lean, Time and attendance software, Geomapping and Geofencing technologies.

Article by JOHN A GELMINI,MBA,BSc(Econ)(2.1) a former Sales Director and line manager with international experience and a pedigree in b2b/b2c/b2NGO who now works with Transaction Focus in these areas as well as performance improvement, operational excellence and customer service optimisation.

CAN YOU STILL AFFORD YOUR SALES FORCE Optimisation IN IT’S PRESENT FORM?

The way it is now and has always been

If your company is like most others in your industry you will have a sales force structure headed up by a sales director, national sales managers, regional managers and then sales managers.
Under this sales management team will be your “road warriors”, possibly split between “hunters”(new business sales people) and “farmers”(account managers, relationship managers, key account executives etc.).

Does this structure make money and is it necessary?

The question is does it make substantially more money than it costs to run or could you in fact do without it…?
Asking your sales director will not get you close to answering that question because he or she has a vested interest in telling you that they are :-

Indispensable and that the sky would fall in if their operation wasn’t there.

We have been sales directors ourselves in a variety of UK and international businesses and will therefore have more experience and knowledge of best in breed global sales directional practices in salaried, part salaried, direct, indirect and commission only sales forces than most sales directors and will provide a transparent ROI focussed view.

The same applies to call centres, contact centres, telesales functions and customer service operations.

What are the figures your sales director would rather you did not know?

Each year the Management Consultancy Group PLC reviews productivity within the UK and global private sectors and across sales functions and a broad cross section of SIC codes.

The picture is far from pretty or satisfactory.
The UK’s private sector productivity is just 60% or put another way; UK business receives 132 days of work for every 220 possible working days leaving us 15th in the global league table of modern industrial nations.
Sales forces fare even worse with the average amount of face to face selling time set at just 10% or one half day per working week.
Just one salesperson in 250 consistently hits their monthly targets in America or the UK despite all the training, managerial effort and the presence of the sales director.

With call centres, customer service functions, telesales operations and contact centres the optimum that can be achieved is 75% (45 minutes) per telephone hour worked but the average is typically less than 50% and we at Transaction Focus (www.transactionfocus.com) have witnessed this figure to be as low as 11%…

Sales empires built on sand

Often this picture is disguised by business which comes into the company anyway, either directly through the switchboard or via the personal contacts of board members or business which comes in through the website but is turned into a sale on which you are probably paying commission as well.
On top of that you may be paying the sales director part of his/her overall remuneration in the form of bonuses which are based on this disguised business.
The question you should ask yourself is whether this is an acceptable situation for your company going into the future?

What can and should be done?

If we take it as a given that doing nothing is not an option what should be done?

We at Transaction Focus believe that the entire operation should be quickly and rigorously audited from top to bottom and the current operation needs to be optimised and future proofed within the form of a new sales and marketing target operating model.
This may well leave the existing sales director in place but operating at a much faster pace and delivering your company a far higher ROI.

In short, they will be earning their keep and as long as they do they retain their place.
Alternatively, the situation might warrant root and branch reform with a new sales director, an interim sales director supplied by us or a new self-determined work team structure with no need for any sales direction whatsoever.

Sales Force optimisation and what it can achieve

With a relatively minimal intervention solution provided by Transaction Focus, your sales force should reach a point without investment in technology whereupon productivity doubles to 20% or one day per week.

With sales force automation, geo-mapping software and CRM, this can be built to 30% and that’s before we even think about training them to be more effective and improve their “strike rate”.

Beyond that BPR and Business Process Innovation linked to TOC, OODA Loop and Japanese style continuous improvement will, in conjunction with our bespoke processes, shorten the sales cycle , make the sales force easier to manage, improve their ROI and improve your cash flow.
We look at sales force composition and compare it with your objectives so that changes can be made as necessary.

Your sales director thinks he/she can do a better job

In that case we put our money where our mouth is by splitting the sales operation into two under equal conditions and then competing directly with the half the sales director is in charge of.
We did this with Kimberly Clark and competed with their established sales operation after a few months.

We can do the same for you.

Sales and telephone outsourcing

It may be that you are trying to break into new markets, sell new products which may or may not cannibalise existing sales, or perhaps you are expanding overseas.
In each of these cases Transaction Focus can set up a seamless “white labelled” sales or telephone based operation which costs considerably less than your existing sales force with or without your incumbent sales director.

In addition the problems associated with discipline, performance and employment law are eliminated because they are assumed by us.

This can be in the UK or practically anywhere outside of the Americas.

JOHN A GELMINI MBA, BSc (Econ)(2.1)

John A Gelmini , an Associate Director at Transaction Focus, has worked in the area of sales direction, sales force and contact centre optimisation, outsourced sales and transformation for more than 22 years.

Why are sales people not respected in the UK..?

Do we have a reputation for hard selling..?..Are sales people lieing manipulators..?

Is it a profession people do when they cannot become lawyers, accountants, bankers or surveyors…??

Are we our own worst enemies..?….”Dell” boys, Spivs..?

Surely we should be revered and worshipped by Financial Directors and Managing Directors for ” bringing in the bacon” and improving cash flow…

Observe the uncomfortable grimace of your Financial Director when you tell him that you (the sales team) pay his salary…!

Please add your views.

Transaction Marketing should not be confused with Transactional Marketing.
Transactional Marketing focuses on single “point of sale” transactions.

Transaction Marketing , on the other hand, is the art of using appropriate marketing mediums (i.e. email, PR, social media, Telemarketing etc.) at the right time, in order to prompt customers to purchase a product or service…in turn facilitating a sales transaction.

In short, Transaction Marketing describes the marketing effort that helps a sales transaction to occur, so that sales opportunities are maximised.
Unlike Transactional Marketing, Transaction Marketing is more of a long term ongoing marketing methodology, that encourages purchasers to reorder, enabling several transactions to take place.

Transaction Marketing is a key lead generation and lead nurturing phase in the customer relationship marketing (CRM) process. High Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the long term aim.
During the Transaction Marketing process, transaction sizes and volumes are audited.

By using the Transaction Marketing process, Financial teams can work closely with Sales and marketing teams to set and measure Return on Investment (ROI), cost per customer acquisition (CPA) and other success metrics that can be built into a Marketing Cost Plan.