Partners in Excellence

AUGUST 7, 2024

Continuing my series on applying lean/agile manufacturing principles to selling, I was reminded by Charles Green and Dave Jackson about an important aspect of these principles that is never mentioned by those promoting lean/agile in our sales assembly lines. What if we learned what lean/agile manufacturers really do?

Trust 139

Trust Assembly Line Manufacturing GTM 139

Martech

MARCH 19, 2025

Edwards Demings 14 principles transformed manufacturing by emphasizing quality, efficiency and continuous improvement. The traditional, assembly-line model of campaign executionwhere data, creative, and deployment are handled in rigid stepsis no longer fast enough for real-time customer engagement.

Assembly Line 75

Assembly Line Manufacturing Campaign Education 75

Partners in Excellence

APRIL 12, 2023

Sellers have, blindly, applied “manufacturing” technique to managing their selling process. Customers and sellers have become widgets moving along the sales manufacturing line, losing the humanity, failing to build trust and confidence the buyers crave.

Assembly Line 124

Assembly Line Customers Tradeshows Manufacturing 124

Partners in Excellence

OCTOBER 15, 2021

We redesign knowledge work, emulating the principles of the industrial assembly lines of the past. We chop up work, creating assembly lines where knowledge workers focus on perhaps the functional equivalent of tightening a bolt. them passing the work to the next person in the knowledge worker assembly line.

Assembly Line 77

Assembly Line Manufacturing Government Up-sell 77

Partners in Excellence

MARCH 31, 2017

We’ve even borrowed concepts from our manufacturing counterparts with leader boards, call counts, data being projected on the walls or scrolling across our dashboards. The SDR passes the customer to a BDR who passes the customer to an AM (Account Manager), who engages a Demoer, than a Product Line specialist.

Assembly Line 74

Assembly Line Manufacturing Account management B2B 74

Partners in Excellence

NOVEMBER 27, 2018

This has a number of advantages, skill levels don’t need to be as high, we can leverage role specialization more effectively (creating sales assembly lines with customer widgets passing through each station), and we can effectively leverage all the traditional selling skills.

Sell 109

Sell Objection handling Assembly Line Territory 109

Partners in Excellence

DECEMBER 4, 2016

However, we are repeatedly see descriptions of selling becoming more like that of a manufacturing line–input a prospect at the beginning of the process, move them step by step through our sales machine, and at the end we spit out a paying customer. Things like trust, relationships come into play.

Assembly Line 55

Assembly Line Customers Manufacturing Objectives and Key Results 55