How To Implement Total Quality Management In Sales
Everyone within the production industry is by now familiar with terms such as 'Quality Circle', 'Total Quality Management' and 'Right First Time'. With increasing competition, responsible managers in the service sector, are gradually realising that strategies such as Deming's 14 points are also applicable.
Some sales managers shy away from implementing the quality programme, maintaining that selling is totally different from production and is therefore not covered in their sales training programme.
No-one is denying this, but why should you have to give up a successful concept just because it was formulated for another sector?
How can Deming's 14 points be adapted to the sales area?
1. Your clients, colleagues and the expense of the sales process form the framework for your managerial decisions. Each of these elements need to be checked and further developed. Be wary of inflexible departmental thoughts.
2. Switch to a new philosophy: quality, not quantity. Quality should be at the centre of your considerations and the first yardstick of your sales team. Rather than producing 10 standard offers, which entail the clients having to make further enquiries, it is better to produce one flawless offer, which satisfies every client requirement.
3. Quality does not come about from checking results and touching up rejects. Quality comes about by changing and improving a work process until the prospect of a mistake becomes increasingly unlikely.
4. Do not only look at the primary costs in your calculations. You should also consider the positive effect of smooth co-operation, punctual payment and reliable business practices. One pound which saved in the first instance, but when a further three pounds in follow-up work was incurred, it had not been worth it.
5. Never be satisfied with the stage you have reached. Even with everything going smoothly, the markets as well as your business environment will be in constant flux. Continuous efforts to adapt your work processes to the demands of the market will reduce the danger of falling behind your competitors.
6. Push for 'training on the job' for your colleagues. Training is neither a charitable social obligation of your employer nor a present from your managers, but the foundation of the performance potential of employees. It does not take place once a year, but is an integral part of a quality-oriented work process.
7. Look on your job as sales manager as a leadership task. Create a working environment which allows your colleagues to work at maximum efficiency. Ensure that any sales training they receive includes elements of good time management. Eliminate barriers to communication between you and your salespeople.
8. Eliminate fear, which is a source of mistakes. Fear is one of the primary causes of problems related to quality and productivity. Ask yourself: does your style of management create an environment in which your salespeople are not afraid of coming to you with a problem?
9. Ban department-centred thinking. An organisation cannot function effectively if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. In particular, there must be smooth and permanent channels of communication, both of a formal and informal nature, between the marketing department and the sales department.
10. Do not rely on key words and planned objectives. If your salespeople are forced into restricting their telephone calls to five minutes you are, dictating a time plan, without conveying any concept of quality. Of course you need to have numerical goals, but productivity will increase more if the workplace of your salespeople is properly equipped, than if your salespeople suddenly panic when they realise that they need six minutes on the telephone.
11. Eliminate work plans which merely consist of bare statistics. Such plans are usually the result of average values, which means that half of your salespeople fail in the task. Individualise the work and demands so that the concept of quality is not suppressed by the constraint of unsuitable figures.
12. Incorporate temporary staff into your quality standards regime. Temporary staff are not there to cushion the effect of temporary numerical short-falls in staff but to maintain the quality of your department's work.
13. Install a training and further development system, which allows your colleagues to produce work of high quality even under increased demand. The better trained your salespeople are, the more flexibly they can be employed. The greater the overview they have of the whole sales scene, the more strategically they have of the whole sales scene, the more strategically they will be able to act.
14. Quality is a corporate goal and, as such, is a matter of concern to every company employee. Quality is not only the concern of the boss, it is the responsibility of everyone in the company and therefore should be included in any internal sales training programmes.
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