Blog

Chances are your organization is trying to find ways to be more competitive by seeking ways to lower costs, while maintaining or increasing customer satisfaction. Regardless of the economic situation, savvy organizations and their leaders are constantly looking for ways to improve quality, reduce costs, and increase customer loyalty.

Over the years, organizations have explored and implemented a variety of process and quality improvement methodologies. Some examples include Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and Total Quality Management. Although varied in practice and approach, at the core of each one of these programs is the desire to improve organizations and deliver measurable results. So, if that’s the case, why do organizations experience differing results when implementing these programs?

The greatest process improvement dilemma faced by organizations today is that far too often, the improvements made are anything but continuous. The aforementioned programs run their course, and once team members have completed them, they return to their “real work,” and maybe more telling, their “old habits.”

What’s at stake? How can you ensure that continuous improvement measures form the basis of long-term solutions, as opposed to quick fixes? Continuous process improvement is a culture change that must begin at the top. Executives must view process improvements as “real changes,” meant to become a core part of their workforce’s “real work.”

Here are the steps to follow to make your next process improvement stick:

1. Gain executive sponsorship. If your organization’s leaders are not championing the process improvement, proceed with caution! You can ensure executive sponsorship by building executive sign offs into the process.
2. Communicate the strategy of continuous improvement to each member of the impacted workforce and engage top managers and front-line leaders as “trainers” of the process improvement.
3. Hold people accountable for improving their work processes by adding continuous process improvement behaviors and objectives to individual development plans. People who are responsible for executing work know where there are known shortcomings in the process and typically offer solutions on how to improvement them.
4. Reward employees for continuously analyzing their work processes to determine methods for improvement.

Creating a culture of continuous improvement is a critical component of maintaining a competitive edge in the marketplace. This can only happen when responsible leaders and workforces commit to the ongoing goal of making process improvements stick with the organization.

How does your organization respond when the “way things have always been” just won’t cut it? Every organization will inevitably face a situation where its people are challenged to question long-standing assumptions governing thinking, processes, and accepted practices. In light of the current economic climate, your organization might be struggling to make uncomfortable adjustments even now.

Research shows that high-performing organizations excel during tough times. One way they do this is by not taking the easy way out, by not simply accepting dogmatic practices that are just plain out of touch. What do you think might happen if you were to challenge your organization’s current assumptions about the way of doing business? Sure, you might get some pushback and/or some uneasy stares, but what you are certain to gather are some fresh, innovative, and unique ideas.

Five Star recently conducted a companywide brainstorming exercise that you could quickly and easily implement in your organization. This activity was inspired by Michael Michalko’s book, Thinkertoys, which chronicled the creation of the Smart Shirt.

1. Put together a list of accepted, organizational assumptions.
2. Break into small groups, and assign each group an assumption.
3. Ask each group to “flip” the assigned assumption.
   Example Assumption: We work Monday through Friday.
   Reverse Assumption: We work when the customer needs us.
   Potential Idea: Allow employees to work a more flexible schedule to meet increased demands.
4. Work through ideas of how things “would be” if the reversed or flipped assumption were true.
5. Share ideas.

The goal of the activity is to gather every possible idea and then evaluate each one’s potential effectiveness. Studies show that if ideas can work for the flipped assumption, it’s likely they can also work in some form for the original assumption.

Whatever your particular situation, your organization can use this activity to brainstorm new ways to push the envelope and be successful in today’s economic climate.

The highly competitive global market has placed a premium on arming sales forces with the information needed to engage clients in a dialogue about products and services as quickly as possible. Developing customized sales presentations that contain current, branded, and legally approved content can be a challenge for both large and small organizations alike. Sales teams spend valuable time and resources retrieving and verifying relevant information from a variety of different sources for their sales presentations. Time spent searching through old sales presentations and consulting product development and legal departments to validate information is time taken away from their primary role of selling.

To make the process of designing, developing, and delivering more efficient, Five Star recently partnered with one of our largest global clients to develop support tools that leverage this kind of expertise across key organizational departments, including sales, marketing, product, and legal, to deliver on-demand presentations. These “Presentation Builder Tools” allow a sales person to step through a series of questions or options to craft a presentation deck that considers product mix, sales life cycle stage, and competitive intelligence. In a few short steps the salesperson has a current, legally approved presentation to share with their clients. A process that once took several days can be completed in a matter of minutes.

The presentations developed using these tools are not only effective for use with clients, but they also serve to keep sales staff up-to-date on new product offerings and enhancements. The tools can be used to onboard new staff, showcase new product and service offerings, and highlight previous successes. In addition, they can also provide information to augment the presentation, such as audio files that provide talking points about products and lifecycle stages. These clips provide expert direction, pointing to relevant case studies and checklists to help solidify an effective sales delivery.

Solutions like Presentation Builder Tools illustrate the value of integrating the Five Key Drivers. High-performance organizations continuously improve to support their workforce by providing technology that enables the efficient delivery of services to customers. In this case, the Presentation Builder Tools helped our client maximize their sales team’s efficiency by delivering accurate, consistent, and approved offerings to their customers.

What current processes hinder your sales organization’s ability to effectively execute it’s sales strategy?