Sales Process Excellence Podcast

Michael Webb:     B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision-makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and system thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict, and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:     Michael Webb here, and I am excited today to bring two very interesting people to your attention. We have Adrian and Tiffani Figueroa, and Tiffani has founded a firm called Improv It Up that is devoted to using the skills of improvisation to help B2B salespeople to improve their performance. So Adrian and Tiffani, welcome here!

Tiffani Sierra:         Hi!

Adrian Figueroa:   Hi Michael.

Tiffani Sierra:         Thank you so much, Michael, for having us.

Michael Webb:     Well, you're quite welcome. I think this is going to be really interesting since improv is something that always fascinates people. And how it's connected to B2B sales. Could each of you take like 30 seconds and help the audience understand just a little bit about your background, and in your case especially, Tiffani, go on and say how did you get started in doing this?

Tiffani Sierra:         My background is as an actress. I spent my whole life as an actress in the theaters, San Francisco and New York and L.A. I started teaching an acting class out in West Hollywood, and I was working with actors mainly, because improvisation is vital if you want to audition. It's really important that you're able to be able to think on your feet and just pick up things quickly. But what started to happen was, I was getting non-actors coming into my workshop. So I started to get engineers, scientists, business owners, priests. I'm being honest when I say that. You can imagine that you know all of the jobs they've probably come through our workshop. What was happening was all of these students that were coming to my class were saying that improv was really changing their lives.

Tiffani Sierra:         Just to kind of backtrack just a bit. I went to the Second City, which is a huge improv school based in Chicago, but I went to the L.A. location. And improv really changed my life. I went through a really tragic family situation and improv really became my therapy. It was at that point that I really realized that the therapeutic elements that were happening in improv, that I could help others. So what started to happen was that was translating into people's lives and obviously really translating into the workplace, no matter what job they had. It was helping them to be more confident. It was helping them with so many other skills. But I realized that this was something not only for actors but really for anyone, that these skills could be used.

Tiffani Sierra:         So really Improv It Up was born in West Hollywood through my experience of working with non-actors. Then really we just grew the business over the past several years. We also work with middle and high school students, we have programs. We're a social enterprise, and what that means is, I like to think, is a for-profit business with heart. So the heart part of what we do is our school programs and then we have our corporate and business programs as well.

Michael Webb:     Okay, wow, what a fascinating background. So real quickly, Adrian, your background's quite different, right?

Adrian Figueroa:   Oh yeah, significantly. Tiffani's story's much more exciting than mine. For me, it's going the path of the engineer. My background, engineering, mechanical engineering, then the MBA. Working in the industry, being a part of building products in aerospace, those being my strengths in industries. Then through there just getting certifications with Lean, Six Sigma, supply chain, and so just growing the process side of it. Tiffani and I met each other and she had this business going, and I started sitting in on all the workshops years ago then became a facilitator alongside with her.

Adrian Figueroa:   It was marrying both of our loves and passions where, we like to say, I'm the left brain, right? I'm more methodical and a little cool. Probably tending more toward the hard skills. And then Tiffani comes in as the right brain, being more the creative artistic and the soft skills. What we offer businesses is you get the best of both worlds. Hard, soft skills, left brain, right brain. We kind of complete each other.

Tiffani Sierra:         We're very opposite.

Michael Webb:     Yeah! So some neat people who listen to my podcast regularly may remember Adrian. We did an interview a month or two ago, I think, and your day job is Lean facilitator at Cadence Aerospace, as I understand.

Adrian Figueroa:   Right.

Michael Webb:     So you've been able, it sounds like, to use some of these improv skills in your leadership at the aerospace company, is that true?

Adrian Figueroa:   Yes, every day.

Michael Webb:     That's amazing.

Adrian Figueroa:   Where I'm most effective is being able to use that soft skills side to actually commit to and bring forward the hard skills. Profits and results.

Michael Webb:     Okay, all right. So Tiffani, why did these men and women off the street who are not theater majors, why did they want to attend your improv class and what did you give them that made it so valuable?

Tiffani Sierra:         Well, I think a lot of these non-actors, salespeople, entrepreneurs that have come to our class really have come because there's a lot of fears. You might have the fear of public speaking. We have a lot of students that come to us, believe it or not, that even work in sales. They have fears of public speaking. Or fear of failure is a huge one. We actually, Adrian and I, facilitated a workshop called Fail Into Success. It was really obvious, them trying to get comfortable when they're uncomfortable. So that's something that we see a lot. I would say those two things, and building confidence, really, the confidence to be you. I can't tell you. It sounds so simple. But when someone can have such ownership of who they are and really be their authentic self, I just believe that helps to draw authentic connections with other people. I think that's just such an important piece of being a salesperson, coming across as authentic and genuinely connecting with people. So I would say those are probably some of the top things that a lot of people have come to our classes for.

Tiffani Sierra:         How improv works is, just so your listeners can kind of understand, a lot of people who have maybe never seen an improv show might think that you just make up whatever you want. That there's no structure. But believe it or not, if you watch shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway, have you seen that show, Michael?

Michael Webb:     Yes, I have and it makes me laugh because those guys are funny.

Tiffani Sierra:         Okay, well, they're great and wonderful improvisors. Actually a lot of them went to the Second City, the school that I went to...

Michael Webb:     B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:     I'm excited today to introduce you to Claude Bardy. Claude is a consultant in France. Claude, welcome here.

Claude Bardy:        Thank you, Michael. I'm excited to be here.

Michael Webb:     So we have only talked a couple times in the past and I'm really interested to learn about your background here. The audience will see why here as this unfolds. But tell us about your background and what has led you to what you do today.

Claude Bardy:        Okay, yeah. Thanks, Michael. I am a French national, born in France, lived in France and Europe, and the US of A. I consider myself an international French person. Multi-culti, speak five languages, so I've been around in various environments. And from a work perspective, I trained initially as an engineer, so technical background. I hold an engineer's diploma from one of the French schools. But I moved to sales almost 30 years ago. No, more than 30 years ago, sorry, and haven't gone back. I've been doing sales since 1987. It's a decision because I wanted to concentrate on relationship, on helping businesses grow, and I thought my contribution was best in the sales, and I like the challenge.

Michael Webb:     Okay. So out of curiosity, what was it you were selling in the very first sales job?

Claude Bardy:        I was selling CAD CAM systems.

Michael Webb:     Okay, cool.

Claude Bardy:        Computer aided design. It's one thing led to another, my first job was a technical job with the software company called Dassault Systems, which produces or designs the software called CATIA. And from there I tried selling it and started my sales path using that, or based on this CATIA software, CAD CAM software. And I've sold that to small businesses in France. I've sold that to larger businesses in France, but that was only France. And after, how is it? '93, so six years, I moved to selling telecom systems, international.

Claude Bardy:        So there I did a couple of, no more than a couple, seven, eight years in the telecom and payments field. So my customers were international operators, telecoms, banks, all over the world, all over the world. As I say, I lived on in C 66 K in a Boeing 747 flying all over the world.

Michael Webb:     All right, and so what what led you then to what you're doing today?

Claude Bardy:        I stopped my sales career as an employee in 2009. I'd been selling managing sales team and running sales organizations, business units, focusing on sales. And since 2009 my employer and I split up in 2009. And I set myself up as a consultant, still interested in sales. I like sales, I like sales teams, I like trying to improve and help a sales team sell better. And so I set up shop as an independent consultant in 2009. And now I help businesses develop sales projects usually related to new businesses or restructuring and changing a sales organization.

Claude Bardy:        And along the way I have acquired a bunch of other competencies. I'm a certified coach because I felt this was needed. Sales is also a people thing. So new products are important, processes are important, but people are also very, very important. And coaching was, to me, obvious as a set of skills which I needed to be successful.

Michael Webb:     So what kinds of principals in the process oriented world, operational excellence, systems thinking, lean six sigma types of things. What sorts of principles have attracted you, and especially with respect to how they apply to sales?

Claude Bardy:        Right. You can imagine the situation in 2009 when I started my consulting business. I said, "How am I going to go from a wish to a business in helping a sales organization?" I had been exposed to very primitive sales processes, or in-house self developed mom and pop CRMs. And I thought there must be some better way to do that.

Claude Bardy:        So I simply honestly very directly Googled, "Sales process," and came across a guy called Michael Webb who you might be familiar with, and I liked what he said. So I bought his words, read that and try to apply that to my consultancy cases. And to come back to your question, principles, I think that there is not a single component which explains sales performance. I think it's, sure, product a little bit, pricing. It's like the three or four Ps of marketing, product, pricing, sure. But people, and process, and also how you manage the sales team. I must make, let's say, define a little bit the scope or the field I'm working in.

Claude Bardy:        I work only on B2B and usually B2B to C kind of businesses. I don't do B to C. It's a different set of principles and rules. But in B2B, face to face complex, remember I'm an engineer. I like complex solutions, complex situations. And selling in those environments are ... Well, you need a process approach. But success doesn't come just from having the right process. You need to manage the thing.

Claude Bardy:        And just to give an illustration, I believe in the power, lots of Ps today, in the power of a sales review done as quote, "Coaching kind of sales review." I have seen with my customers, and I must say I've been slightly guilty too, sales reviews which are just and only focused on the weighted expected revenue shown in the pipeline. I think that is a partial approach, and the reason is the following. Salespeople, sales managers, sales directors, as we call them here in Europe, have a lot of pressure to meet the numbers.

Claude Bardy:        This is all over the world, and not just in France or in Europe. But this pressure, number one. Number two, human nature being what it is, people tend to too easily move an opportunity down in the funnel. And with the weighted average, the pipeline looks like nice. The weighted year and revenue looks nice. Whereas the sales, I told the process, the real sales just does not reflect the actual chance of reaching that forecast revenue. Do you see what I mean?

Michael Webb:     Yeah, I do. So, I'm hearing two things in there. I'm hearing, it's sort of like if you've ever seen maybe a young adult or a teenager, sometimes an older adult, and they get a dog as a pet. And the dog gets out of the house and is starting running outside. And they don't want that to happen so they start yelling at the dog, "Come back here, you." And he'd chase the dog. Right? "Come back here," and that's just going to make the dog go the other direction. Right?

Michael Webb:     And so sort of our human nature is if you want more sales, you go push for the sales, and the sales people are going to tell you what you want to hear. I mean, it's-

Claude Bardy:        Absolutely.

Michael Webb:     Right? So that's on...

Michael Webb:         Some people talk about selling to senior-level decision-makers, making calls, and selling based on value. Other people talk about process tools and measurement of data, systems thinking, analyzing causes and effect. But not very many people talk about how these things can be brought together to motivate people and create wealth for everyone. Today, I'm delighted to have a kindred spirit who I've known for several years, Christian Maurer, a consultant in France. Christian, welcome here. Really, really excited about our conversation today.

Christian Maurer:     Thank you for having me.

Michael Webb:         Well, so this is going to be really, really fun. Now a couple of preparation notes here. Christian and I are talking on a recorded line, and we have the best audio quality we can get, but something is amiss in it and so I've asked Christian... and Christian has a slight accent, although he's an excellent English speaker, to my ear anyway, some of the stuff that seems to have been a little hard to understand, so we're going to kind of overcompensate. I've asked him to speak especially slowly, and I may even interrupt him, re-enunciate or confirm that I understand what he's saying. And we're not doing that because ... we're just doing it because we think there's an issue in the audio quality. So, I apologize for that in advance, but this I promise you is going to be worth paying attention to.

Michael Webb:         As we begin here, Christian, could you tell us 30 seconds of your background, and what kinds of things did you do, and what are you doing now?

Christian Maurer:     Thank you. Well, I started out as an electrical engineer. I have a degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and then I went into engineering in the sense of product manager and project manager. Then, I got into selling very complex systems, and from there my career took me then more into the corporate world where I was the director of strategic planning for a whole corporation. That's when I came to France. And then after a while, I had enough of the corporate life, and I was headhunted by a little boutique consultancy specialize-

Michael Webb:         Who is this again? I'm sorry. Who you were headhunted by?

Christian Maurer:     By a little boutique consultancy.

Michael Webb:         Okay.

Christian Maurer:     And this boutique consultancy was specialized on sales trainings and sales consulting. So, I started a second career as a sales trainer and sales consultant, and this little private firm then was gobbled up by a large CRM company which was gobbled up by a very large software company, and at the end the software company thought that we were a very interesting, special team, but we would strive more if we will be taken private. So, we got a private investor.

Michael Webb:         Okay. Hang on one second. I'm hearing ... I hope it's okay if I do this, but I'm suspecting it was target account selling, was purchased by Ceba, was purchased by Oracle. is that right?

Christian Maurer:     You got it.

Michael Webb:         Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Christian Maurer:     You got it. Spot on right. And then-

Michael Webb:         Because I worked with IMPAX Corporation. I was, I was a competitor. When I was a sales trainer with IMPAX Corporation, I was a competitor to target account sell. One of the guys who founded target account selling started out his sales training career at IMPAX working for Dave Matlow. So anyways, small world. So, go ahead-

Christian Maurer:     Small world. So then, you also know how the story then ended that we became the task group for the private investors. Today, this company still exist. It's called [inaudible 00:04:08]. But after about a year or two, I found out that probably there was only one person who should think in this company and that was the CEO. So, I start become working on my own. But I continued into Royal Golf sales consultancy and sales training. Then a little later, I was approached by two universities in Germany if I would take some courses in the postgraduate level. So, I teach now graduate courses for master classes.

Michael Webb:         Okay. Very good. Very good. So, now we get to the fun part. In our conversations over several years, I've learned about Christian that he made some of the same observations I did as a salesperson, sales manager, sales trainer. And what we observed in being in those environments was that there was something amiss, something funny, odd, not right about the way that we were being managed, about the decisions that our sales department heads, sales vice president, sales and marketing executives, and CEOs were making in regard to resources, and people, and how to run things. And there was something wrong. Christian saw some similar things.

Michael Webb:         So, let's start there. Christian, what are some of the things that you saw during your time in sales that led you to start saying what's going on here? Why isn't this right?

Christian Maurer:     Yeah. You certainly know the old saying to have more feet on the street will make more sales.

Michael Webb:         To have more feet, yeah, on the street will make more sales. Oh, yes.

Christian Maurer:     Yeah. Right. Okay. The only trouble with that is that there is the law of diminished return on effort. So, if you have a territory which is saturated, if you put a second salesman in there, the only thing you do is that you have two salesmen who can no longer make their quota because there's not enough potential.

Michael Webb:         Right. So, you saw that happen I guess?

Christian Maurer:     Oh, yeah. That was always what was told, and then afterwards people wanted to ... Another one which is very funny is the must-win deal.

Michael Webb:         Cool.

Christian Maurer:     Today with CRM systems. If there's a big fish in system that goes up to the VP of sales, maybe even higher, and guess what? It's declared a must-win deal. Now, things are not sold. Things are bought. Now, if you want to force to buy before it's ready, the only way that maybe has a chance to is you lower your price, right?

Michael Webb:         Right.

Christian Maurer:     So, if you lower your price, guess what happens to the quota of your sales force?

Michael Webb:         It goes up. So, you discount your way out of making your quota. Not only that, you rob the company of profitability.

Christian Maurer:     Yeah. Or taking another way, sales managers going in at the last moment as the rebate uncle, he's counting deals, right?

Michael Webb:         Right.

Christian Maurer:     And in sales management trainings, I sometimes made a little thing and said, okay, you have four deals and you discount by 20%. Now, if you still want to make quota, you need to have a fifth deal, don't you? And you get people staring at you like ...

Michael Webb:     B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict, and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.

Michael Webb:     I'm pleased today to have a fantastic person on our show. His name is Robert Tripp. He has a very long career as a consultant and a trainer and a master black belt. Robert, welcome here.

Robert Tripp:          Yes, thank you Michael. It's good to be here on the call with you.

Michael Webb:     Robert is with a firm, Argo LLC. Robert, for our audience, please provide a little, you know, where did you come from and how did you get where you are and what does Argo LLC do?

Robert Tripp:          When I began my career a few decades ago, I never would have thought that I would, I guess, evolve into a space that allowed me to concentrate in process improvement, and process excellence, and quality management systems, but it all really began back in 1995. I had been working in the finance community in a manufacturing organization back in 1995, and I got tapped on to engage in a Six Sigma training effort to become a black belt. I thought it seemed new and unique and different, and I thought yes, let's give it a try.

I started down the path in 1995, which eventually certified as a master black belt. Soon after that, and by 1998, I was consulting, and that was just at the time when the industry was really starting to become active. There were a couple of small deployments early on, starting with Motorola and then it moved into a little bit with Texas Instruments and ABB and then Allied Signal. I was working at Allied Signal at the time.

But then beginning in 1998, I was able to begin working with a lot of different clients and that's when my consulting career started, and I started down the path of designing deployments, creating content, delivering training coaching projects, developing people and leaders in the organization to drive Six Sigma within their own communities.

Somewhere along the line there was a merger between the whole concept of Six Sigma and Lean and the ideas around both and how they really compliment each other and so. I'd say around the mid-2000s it became more of an effort around marketing and involving myself in Lean Six Sigma, and really that's what I've been doing since then. For the last few years I've been working with a number of different clients, but really in a small cluster of course partners, and in the last six months I've been independent, so it's been an interesting path.

The company that I have created is Argo LLC, and we basically work with organizations, large, small, and medium size to deploy continuous improvement tools. It ranges from grand corporate-wide deployments, which I'm working on right now, to smaller deployments, which just involves training and coaching a few project., You know, the landscape has changed, so the versatility and being able to apply the tools in different environments is important, and based on the, you know, the history I think we're able to argue that.

Michael Webb:     You've been at a perch where you could watch the industry sort of unfold and watch the changes that have taken place, so what have you observed?

Robert Tripp:          Well, I think one of the most interesting things that I've observed, it's really in the late nineties, early two-thousands, Six Sigma was a foreign concept. Winning was an important concept and well, maybe, you know, maybe organizations coming out of the manufacturing arenas had great familiarity with similar tools, if not tools of the same name. The broader scope of the industries, including financial services, health care, a lot of different government offices, things like this, they did not have exposure to Six Sigma. But as we sort of evolved and developed through the two thousands and in the last, you know, five to 10 years, it's really becoming ubiquitous.

Almost everybody you run into certainly has heard of Lean and Six Sigma. In addition to that, they've had some exposure either in terms of participating in Lean Six Sigma deployments, or former employer or being part of the projects or even maybe taking classes through collegiate courses and things like that. It's been interesting to watch the general level of awareness increase, but with that also comes a level of lack of awareness in the same way, so in other words, that people are getting exposed to it at a very superficial level. They know conceptually what it is, but they are not familiar still with how to deploy it and how to execute to really drive results for the organization.

Michael Webb:     What is the percentage of Six Sigma deployments that actually achieve the goals that their companies start out with?

Robert Tripp:          You know whether it's the stated goals as they are put down on paper and published to the rest of your organization to justify the resources being the time and effort being spent to deploy it.  That may be a little bit different than the vision and the hopes than the people who deploy it who want to achieve, so just starting with the stated goals, you know, it's 90 to 100%. I don't think that, you know, the payback on Lean and Six Sigma is never, or I don't think it's ever a negative payback. The challenges, you know, are you really reaching the cultural, you know, DNA of the organization and that's where things fail, and it takes time to do that.

It takes patience and persistence to make that happen, but in addition, that sort of cultural transformation is difficult to measure so to say that there was a specific goal in that arena I think is a little bit difficult, but I would also say that there are a lot of people that are not satisfied with the way that their deployments are, I guess sustained within the organization's management system over time.

Michael Webb:     I have heard statements not just about Six Sigma deployments, but about also other kinds of deployments, Lean deployments and so forth that, you know, it's typical in the industry that more than 80% of these initiatives they end up being disappointing, they end up not actually achieving the goals and objectives. Have you heard that?

Robert Tripp:          Yeah, I have heard that sort of thing, and we agreed to the extent that they have not achieved the sustainability and the cultural transformation that the proponents are looking for. However, what they do achieve is certainly bringing some level of improvement in customer satisfaction and the level of improvement of internal, the process quality performance, and with that financial results that pay for the resources invested in the deployment. That being said, yes, no question there are a lot of deployments that do not exceed, or might exceed, but achieve the overall goal, but I would not say that they were a waste of time.

Michael Webb:     Let's examine that dark side there for a minute about not achieving the cultural, I mean, I have heard the term even Six Sigma Nazis inside of a big company. The Six Sigma department ends up attempting to enforce some standards on how projects are do...

Michael Webb: Some people focus on making sales calls, reaching decision-makers and selling value. Other people focus on finding data, understanding cause and effect, and conducting experiments. This is Michael Webb and this is the Sales Process Excellence podcast where we focus on doing both, to create wealth for everyone.

I'm excited today to have a guest, an unusual person. This is Charles Chen who has followed a career that has had transitions that make him uniquely insightful in our quest here to improve sales processes around the world. He was a mechanical engineer, and then he transitioned to being a Six Sigma Green Belt and an engineering project manager at, I think he worked at Ford and then GE and then a bank and then ultimately became a master Black Belt at Microsoft. And has worked on customer-facing projects in sales and marketing. So Charles, welcome here.

Charles Chen:    Thanks, Michael. It's great to be with you.

Michael Webb: So it would be great, I did a little bit of a thumbnail sketch there of your background. I mean, tell us how you got to where you are and what kind of motivated you along the way. I know that readers would like to hear a little color commentary on why you're here.

Charles Chen:    Oh sure, sure. So my background, you touched the right two points. I started my career a long time ago at Ford Motor Company. Also, an engineer, graduated from University of Michigan with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. After three years I went to Yale business school. Upon graduation, I started work at GE and this time was not in engineering, it was in sales enablement. So it was there that I earned my Green Belt, but we did a project fundamentally enhanced the productivity of that sales organization.

After two years there, I went to Washington Mutual Bank as a corporate officer. I ran the Black Belt project over there, ran the team as well. Saw that bank was about to tilt a year before it finally did and went to Microsoft. At Microsoft, I've been here for 11 years. This is my fifth role with the company. What's most profound in my career at Microsoft has been when I was in our internal Six Sigma consulting and teaching group and I focused our efforts in sales and marketing. So I personally ran multiple projects at the global scale focused on sales and marketing, improving revenue, either conversion rate or win rate or velocity.

And I personally coached 11 folks on Microsoft to earn their Green Belt, Black Belt certification. Half of them were from sales and marketing as well, even a few from our incentive comp organization. So yeah, that's my background, my last role with ... yeah, that's my background. Thank you.

Michael Webb: So Six Sigma has a reputation for being very doctrinaire, very jargony. Not everybody from a sales background. In fact, a lot of people from sales background get turned off as soon as you say Six Sigma, but there are some very valuable underlying principles that apply in sales. And I don't want to assume that the audience knows the jargon and stuff.

And so I thought I would ask you to tell us on example, two steps here. The first step is, tell us an example of some problems that were taking place when you first started doing Six Sigma work. What were the problems that were taking place in the business that couldn't be solved without taking this Six Sigma approach? So what were they struggling with? Why couldn't they fix it on their own? What did this DMAIC, right? Define, measure ... this Six Sigma. Why was that needed?

Charles Chen:    Yeah. Yeah, totally. Let me use an example from my very first project, even at GE. This division at GE is GE Equipment Services. GE Equipment Services they own a lot of assets. And this division in particular own billions of dollars of tractor and trailers. So Michael, if you're going down the highway, you see a 46-foot or 53-foot tractor going down shipping something, that tractor in the back, a huge percentage of those in North America are owned by General Electric. Pretty profound, right? They built aircraft engines, but they also own assets like that.

One thing very, very fundamental about that sort of asset I think everybody can appreciate is how do you make money on that asset? You make them money, you own the product itself, you own it. The moment it sits on your lot it's depreciating. It's just like an airplane, a commercial airplane. The moment it sits on the tarmac you're losing money. You've got to get that thing flying all the time. The same thing with these tractors and trailers.

So what typically happened when I joined that part of GE is, they have hundreds of thousands of these tractors and trailers, spontaneously, suddenly, a whole fleet of them shows up at the GE site. Then the salespeople are running around with their heads mad, trying to get them out the door again. Some of them sit there for months. Every month is losing money. So that was a fundamental issue. It's like their barely making it and everything was reactive, and how do we know that these things are coming back and make sure they don't come back? Or if they come back as barely a touchpoint and then boom, they're back out with the same customer, or with a different customer, or the best part is they don't even come back in the first place. So that was the fundamental problem they're trying to solve. Yeah. So the project how I got involved. Yeah, go ahead.

Michael Webb: Why couldn't they solve it? I mean I'm sure there was lots of people who could see the problem. Why did you have to do Six Sigma to solve it?

Charles Chen:    Yeah, I think there's a combinations of that. This division of GE was fairly recently acquired. So a lot of the folks in the senior leadership chain came from GE. So they have a Six Sigma background. And in fact, most of them were Black Belts and Master Black Belts. At the same time, you still have the traditional folks on the site who got acquired with the company. So there was a culture change in the first place. How do you get everybody to recognize that we got to solve this problem together and look at it from a different way?

Michael Webb: And as opposed to everybody, you stay in your own lane, I'm doing a good job. Leave me alone.

Charles Chen:    That's right. That's right. As long as I'm making money, as long as I am a seller, I make money, I meet my quota, I'm good. But the cost to the company, which this eludes to, is very real and very material. And to really bring up the margins, you've got to worry about both. And there has always been complaints from the sales team that when they want to get trailers out, they don't have enough trailers. Or they're being bombarded by requests from managers to, hey, I got you to find a way to find homes for 4,000 new trailers. So that added pressure and friction is very real for the company.

Michael Webb: Okay. All right. So that's the problem. And it's pressure and it's not being solved and people aren't cooperating. What does Six Sigma bring?

Charles Chen:    Yeah. So I was ... so Six Sigma, actually approaches in the very traditional DMAIC approach, but let's take a step back and not go into the extreme technical details of that. Fundamentally, as a salesperson, as a senior manager, you want to have a pulse on all your assets, all these expensive assets. You want to know sometime before they have a tendency to come back, you already know about them. You want early warnings, early signals that any one of these trailers could be coming back to the company.

So what I did was I work with the executive management chain and the sales leaders...

Michael Webb:     Some people focus on making more sales calls, reaching higher-level decision-makers, and selling value propositions. Other people focus on finding data, understanding cause and effect, and conducting experiments. My name is Michael Webb. This is the Sales Process Excellence podcast, where we focus on both of those things in order to create wealth for everyone.

Today, I'm thrilled to have a guest, Adrian Figueroa, of Cadence Aerospace. Adrian has a background as an engineer leading manufacturing organizations, leading continuous improvement and lean initiatives in several different companies. From our little chat here before we got started on this podcast, I'm really excited about the kinds of things he's going to be able to bring to us.

Adrian, welcome here.

Adrian Figueroa:   Hi Michael, thank you for having me on your show.

Michael Webb:     It'd be great, can you just give us a minute of background and tell us how you got to be where you are, and what you do at Cadence Aerospace?

Adrian Figueroa:   Yeah, so my first start was a Manufacturing Engineer in the aerospace industry, and there I was learning just the principles of achieving the numbers. All I cared about was doing my job well. From that point, I started getting a little bored with what I was doing, and I went back to school. I ended up finding a new job which gave me more opportunity to grow. That's actually where actually I fell into Lean Manufacturing.

Lean ended up opening my world, up until this point in my life, where the expansion from being able to use those tools, methodologies in manufacturing, but then in other industries. It just became so at first overwhelming, but so exciting at the same time. From my first job going to my second, beginning to implement the Lean principles, I ended up…

Michael Webb:     This was in a roofing system, not the first company, but the second company was roofing products is that correct? DECRA Roofing Systems?

Adrian Figueroa:   Yeah, I should say I moved from the aerospace industry to the building and industrial building industry.

Michael Webb:     Okay.

Adrian Figueroa:   From there, that's where I started, again, implementing Lean tools mainly, because I was excited about doing that. Just in general, I love working with people. Over time, it was very, I would say, easy for me to be implementing these tools and talking to the people on the floor. About four years later, after being a Lean leader, I was given the opportunity to move into the Manufacturing Manager role. At that point, I didn't do a thing really within the first month of new large projects, doing all this data analysis, where can we go to next, you just saw a jump in the performance of efficiency and motivation, and I could say morale within that first month to a point where nobody really understood what was going on. They thought maybe I was tweaking the numbers.

Over time, it seemed like... Even I had to get some self-reflection, where I was looking at it and saying, "How did that happen?" The more I was looking into the second half of Lean, or it's respect for people, I started reading more about that. Reading that, hey what I was doing by just listening to others, and working with them on their project teams no matter how big the issue was, I was there to be able to help where I could. Over time, that created a connection with all the individuals on the floor.

By the time I jumped into the role, I had supported everyone along the way that look like they're mirroring that back to me. Now, in my new role they wanted to support me so the motivation was on two sides. The results just jumped, like I said, enormously. It was fun after that point.

Michael Webb:     That's the sort of thing that people might call the Magic of Personality, is that right?

Adrian Figueroa:   Yeah, I mean that's part of why I do what I do now. I'm mainly focusing on the people side, still within the continuous improvement realms of either Lean or Six Sigma. But, I'm more heavily concentrated on behaviors in people rather than tools.

Michael Webb:     That is the field of the sort of thing that people consider to be soft, unmeasurable, subjective. You can't really replicate it. You don't really have any way of knowing what's going on. Do you agree with that position?

Adrian Figueroa:   Oh yeah, I think soft skills are very hard to measure and see your gains from that. I think that's why a lot of businesses struggle with actually giving any kind of trainings, or really focusing on that side of it because where are the results from it? That's the type of thing that actually is probably the most time consuming aspect for showing the results. That's what I actually like, is I try and position myself in businesses that are in for the long run instead of a short term gains, because on the behavioral side unfortunately it does take a while to gain that connection with others, and to build that stability with those people and the processes they're working. Because when you-

Michael Webb:     Go ahead.

Adrian Figueroa:   I was just going to say because you have your process that's built for the employees, or created for the employees, and you can only do so much with them. They come in, they have a bad day, they come in... There's so many variables from the human aspect that can make that process fail, that the more you can in a sense control, but not really, but you're creating that set safe environment for them to work on and have more enjoyment at being at work, the easier flow it is for them to follow those process steps.

Michael Webb:     Okay, but would you agree, because I'm going to push back a little bit to one of the things that you said a moment ago. Would you agree that the principles of process excellence, operational excellence, this idea of respect for people and all the ramifications of it, doesn't that provide a sort of repeatable or a framework... So, for being able to tell if you're making progress in those relationships with people.

Adrian Figueroa:   Oh yeah, you definitely need both, from both sides. One can't work without the other. From where I see it, it's that too many businesses are just focused on the tools only, and then wonder why they can't see these gains or they see it for a short period of time and then it goes back to normal. You're definitely correct. I'd agree with the framework’s definitely there from operational excellence let’s just say you have to understand where you're at in the business, assess it, measure it, and then implement for whatever journey the business decides to take, go through with those steps, learn from it and make your adjustments as you go. As long as everybody's on the same path towards the same targets or goals.

Michael Webb:     Years ago I was a Sales Trainer with a company called IMPAX Corporation. That doesn't matter. There's lots of good sales training outfits out there. One of the things that we did that we focused on with the client, was to help the sales people learn to conduct interviews, questions, conversations, to have a skill at active listening in conversations so that they could learn more about the debates, and arguments even, going on inside their aspect company, their client companies. Because, there is a debate that always goes on inside those companies, where people are trying to figure out what are the right decisions to make? What are the right priorities? What a...

Michael Webb:                 Some people talk about selling to senior-level decision-makers, making calls, and selling based on value. Other people talk about process tools and measurement of data, systems thinking, and analyzing causes and effects. But not very many people talk about how these things can be brought together to motivate people and create wealth for everyone.

This is Michael Webb, and welcome to the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. I'm delighted today to introduce you to Greg Helfrich. Greg is the national operations manager at ELRUS Aggregate Systems, and he's the operations manager not just for Canada, but also for the U.S. Welcome, here, Greg.

Greg Helfrich:                    Thank you. Glad to be here.

Michael Webb:                 Yes. I wanted to invite you here because ... I wanted to invite Greg here. He has a story that I know a lot of the audience are going to be interested in. Greg had purchased my book, Sales Process Excellence, and as I chatted with him on the phone, he started describing a way that ELRUS has sort of a sales process, a method of selling value, and it's very well thought out. I knew that a lot of people would like to hear about this, so Greg, give us a little 30 or 45 seconds here of your background, how you got to be where you are.

Greg Helfrich:                    Sure. I got into consulting on an operations and lean perspective after leaving the food industry back in the late 90s. I was trained in Six Sigma and SERD Consulting, and I was doing some supply chain consulting for ELRUS. They just said, "Well, we'd really rather have you just work with us." I joined as national operations manager in 2008, and the position has evolved from being really strictly working in manufacturing and process supply chain and engineering to now being responsible for sales and marketing. My education is in marketing.

But, as we expanded into the United States and grew, my role just basically evolved with it, and so, I wasn't necessarily in charge of marketing all that time, but just got more and more involved. And because I was a buyer, I just had insights into how our customers were thinking, and I could bring something to the table. This is where it just basically evolved from.

Michael Webb:                 Okay. In your role here as national operations manager slash sales VP, I guess, right?

Greg Helfrich:                    Pretty much. I'm essentially chief operating officer, is really, if you had to give it a conventional title. We're not huge on titles here, and so we just haven't changed much.

Michael Webb:                 Okay. You serve the mining, rock quarrying, road construction industries up there?

Greg Helfrich:                    It's primarily, yeah. We like to say that everybody needs to make big rocks into small rocks in mining, everything, like concrete, they surround us everywhere and all that rock has to be quarried or mined out of a sand and gravel operation process and it looks simple but the specifications for rock for say, asphalt or concrete are really quite tight. The shape of the rock, how it has to hold together within that mix is really quite defined and it's getting harder and harder to make those specifications. The equipment evolves over time to make the product that's required to make the roads and the houses and what have you that we live in. The consumables or the parts of the machine are also very complex in terms of how they sort the rock into different sizes and what have you. Everybody, when they look at somebody else's industry always thinks, "Well that's kind of simple" but there's usually a lot more to it then we think. This industry is one of those. On the outside it looks simple but rock is not just rock.

Michael Webb:                 I really like your opening there, making big rocks turn into little rocks because I learned a ton from a fellow a long time ago who is an expert in continuous improvement and he would say that's what we're doing in continuous improvement companies. We're helping people take the big rocks, big problems that they have and break them down into little, manageable problems so that it all adds up.

Greg Helfrich:                    I listened to a fellow the other day who set the world's treadmill record for 12 hours and I can't imagine running on a treadmill for 12 hours. I think he ran 80 some miles in 12 hours on a treadmill. One of the people said, "How can you do that?" At 3 seconds in I'm thinking to myself, "I've got 11 hours, 59 minutes and 57 seconds left." He said, "Anybody can do anything for 5 minutes."

Michael Webb:                 There you go.

Greg Helfrich:                    "That's how I did it." The rock analogy, I'll have to use that because that does make sense. Anybody can do anything for 5 minutes or when you break big rocks into small rocks, anybody can figure out how to do it.

Michael Webb:                 Right. Looking at sales, trying to figure out how to get your customers to buy and pay enough to be able to make money off of them, that can be a big rock also. That's kind of the problem we are trying to solve here. Tell us what you faced when you started into this part of the business there at ELRUS. What did it look like to you as the operating executive that lead you to develop this program?

Greg Helfrich:                    Let's go back to what triggered it. In Canada, we're an incumbent in Canada. We basically were part of the founding of the industry back in 1975 portable crushing equipment was a very undeveloped industry and Roland, the fellow that founded the company was that typical entrepreneur. He saw a problem because he was a crushing contractor and he was really unhappy with what he was dealing with and he solved the problem. He went and built, he built equipment or had it built for him and wound up selling it before he could get to use it. He never really got to use his own equipment. He built some equipment, showed it to a friend, the friend said, "I want that" and then after three or four episodes he's like, "Well, hang on a second here. I might as well get into the equipment business here because I'm building something people want." This business got started. It never really needed a serious marketing and value proposition work or marketing work because Roland sold it and he knew everybody in the industry and life went on. We expanded in the United States, after Roland's death in 2013 and we probably underestimated or overestimated our reputation and brand equity and things that people automatically do when they enter a new marketplace, they assume it's underserved and they assume that people know about them.

We had some difficulties in getting going and people to understand who we were and the differences we made. That was our big rock. How do we get people to see us as different or see us as a viable alternative to who they use now and I always come back to a process. If you're having a failure of results, it's your process. Sometimes it's your people but yo...

Say the word brand and most people think of iconic companies like Nike or Apple with flashy slogans or logos.

But in the B2B context, brand is very different. And, as Andrea Fabbri of Branding Business explains, creating a brand identity is not some vague, touchy-feely process.

An effective brand that can guide sales and marketing – even operations and product development – is based on cold hard data and evidence, both from the company doing the selling and the prospects in their target market.

Andrea talks about his approach to building a brand, as well as…

* Why salespeople are vital to this process

* The key differences between marketing and branding

* How to test a new brand identity almost risk-free

* One of the most underestimated – yet most important – activities when making changes in a company

* And more

Mentioned in This Episode: www.brandingbusiness.com

Too often, says Burke McCarthy, companies focus on their product… the technology they’re offering, as well as the price. But prospects and customers don’t care about that.

No, they’re looking for value. And that exists only between their ears, not in your product. This recognition fundamentally changes how you approach sales and marketing.  Burke reveals the best source to determine this value – it’s closer than you think – as well as how to implement it. And we also talk about…

• The two elements that must be in your customer engagement process 
• Learning a common language with your prospect
• Using salespeople as “spies” - and market researchers
• How to identify advantages you’re not exploiting fully (we all have them)
• And more

In his second appearance on the podcast, Bob Apollo highlights the three things the sales team as a group must understand about their prospect to sell effectively, efficiently, and profitably.

Bob points out that the "silos" bedeviling many organizations can't be avoided without disseminating this knowledge from the frontline to the back.

Tune in to discover…

• Why the Ideal Customer Profile goes beyond demographic and geographic details
• How sales activity-based sales management sabotages revenue goals
• The right way to use a CRM – it’s almost useless “out of the box”
• The metric investors miss when looking at putting money into start-ups
• And more