The QUANTUM Sales Management System is launched.

At last, after almost 12 years of careful research, the Quantum Sales Management System was finally launched on July 20 2016.

The delay was regrettable as much study had to be given due to the dynamic changes in sales management today as well as the willingness of the sales personnel in embracing such system as part of their work culture.  Next, a partner had to be sought, one who has the aptitude to collaborate on such a project especially in the field of programming, to program the system, and on this we welcome Infotree Sdn Bhd (a member of the Ikram Group) to the team.

How does the system work?  Basically, it operates on four simple forms, i.e. the Weekly Planner, the Daily Sales Report, the Prospect Information Sheet and Call Objective Form.  However, these four forms are so well integrated into the system that they are hardly seen at all but the Sales Personnel will be using them, nonetheless.

The system has two sections :

Section 1 : For use by the Sales Leader, whereby he will set the tone and direction for the sales team -
1.1 The number of calls per day
1.2 Determine the call ratio for a certain period, e.g. New Account:Follow up Calls.  Depending on the sales situation of a period where sales are not doing well, the Sales Leader might want to set the Call Ratio at 80:20 percent, i.e. 80% on New Account and 20% on Follow-up Account.  However, in Key Account Management, the ratio may be reversed, e.g. 20:80, i.e. 20% New Account and 80% Follow-up Account.  Once the ratio is set, the Sales Personnel will then begin to plot their sales calls as such.  Any deviation will prompt the system to alert the user that he is not within the parameter of the required calls.
1.3 The system also allow the Sales Leader to dictate the number of visits per client for the staff.  This is to time manage the staff so that they will not waste productive time on unproductive prospects.
1.4 The Call Objective section is for the Sales Leader to highlight to the Sales Personnel the kind of products that needed to be sold in the market.  This will help in moving slow stock which in return help in inventory management.  The other objective is to ensure the Sales Personnel to cross sell company products.

Section 2 : For use by the Sales Personnel to plot their calls for the coming week.  Every item decided by the Sales Leader will be reflected in this section which must be abided by the Sales Personnel.  It will start with the Weekly Planner and then their Daily Sales Report.  Any deviation will be picked up by the system and staff will be alerted.

Benefits:

1.  In the past, as well as present, hard copies are being used in sales planning and reporting. This will now be a thing of the past especially in this age of technology. Companies can now go paperless.
2. Sales Personnel can now do their reporting wherever they may be, even in a mamak shop or kopitiam.
3. Senior management staff, e.g. CEO, ED and/or GM can now view the staff activities and give timely decision to assist them in closing the sale.  However, the senior staff are not allowed to make comments other than the Sales Leader.  They can only view the plan and report, and they do not need to wait for the staff to complete their written report (which might take days) in the office to have it then called for review.
4. Sales Leader can now use the report to execute public relations exercises with new prospects.
5. Sales targets henceforth can be seen as achievable.
6. Staff confidence level will be boosted as they now have a sense of direction in pursuing their sales objectives.

System Effectiveness
 This is a tried and fully tested system used in a club, bank and trading house environment where the writer used to manage. It can also be applied in other kind of businesses.

Suitable for :

• Securing new acccount
• Key Account Management; and
• Managing The Dealers

Current Users :
1. QP Industries Sdn Bhd
2. Protasco Trading Sdn Bhd

Billy Ong (seated second from left) with the technical support team.  On his right is Business Associate, Regina Ng.

The above is just a gist of what the system can do.  For a free demo, without any obligation, you may contact the following :

Billy Ong
Handphone no: 012-688 4989

Regina Ng
Handphone no: 016-288 3091

Or Email us at:
quantumsms16@gmail.com

"POOR SALES RESULTS REFLECT POOR STANDARDS"

In the final leg of the preparation before the launch, the blogger (designer) and the programmers sitting down for one last check.

Billy Ong reviewing the flow of the system

 

Yes, it is working

Wishing all my Muslim friends a Selamat Hari Raya and may God's blessings be upon you and your family.

Some lessons from Latin America’s leading consumer-goods companies

The Latin American economy has seen better days. Over the past few years, Latin American countries have experienced slowdowns in both GDP and private-consumption growth, a rise in inflation rates, and devaluations in currency. In this difficult environment, consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) manufacturers must make careful choices and deliberately weigh trade-offs.

How are the region’s leading CPG companies managing their customers and channels? Our survey of 35 companies offers some best practices. We examine what “winners” do differently from their peers—winners being companies that achieved higher sales growth than the categories they play in while also outperforming peers on one or more customer- or channel-management metrics. 

The survey results show that by applying best practices, companies can grow sales by more than seven percentage points ahead of others, while reducing selling expenses as a percent of net sales (Exhibit 1). This difference in performance between winners and others is bigger than in any other market we studied except China, where the gap is 17 percentage points.<sup>1

Read rest of article here.</sup>

Playing catch-up: How to partner with the retailer of the future

There’s no denying that the balance of power in the consumer industry has tilted. Retailers have the advantage over consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) manufacturers—and retail buyers are deftly using their leverage at the negotiating table. Retail buyers are more sophisticated, more analytical, and more demanding than ever. Consider this: each of the top ten US retailers employs dozens of big data professionals who provide buyers with valuable insights. The same retailers have also hired more than 70 executives from European retail companies, known for having more aggressive negotiation styles than their American counterparts. In this increasingly adversarial environment, what’s a CPG key-account manager to do?

These changes in the retailer-manufacturer dynamic are the result of three trends that have been playing out in the US consumer industry: the steady rise of newer retail channels including hard discount and e-commerce, stagnant growth among the largest CPG brands, and burgeoning capabilities in big data and advanced analytics. The trends have been evident for a few years, yet in our experience the majority of CPG sales leaders are still largely doing things the way they always have. They continue to use the same key-account management (KAM) model and they haven’t enhanced key-account managers’ skill sets to keep up with the increasingly competitive business environment.

The future success of CPG sales teams rests on how aggressively sales leaders move to overhaul their KAM model and upgrade their sales capabilities. In this article, we discuss the most important changes that CPG companies will need to make. Companies that have implemented these changes have driven incremental growth of up to 3 percent above the category, while also reducing sales expenses.

Read rest of article here.

Jack Ma speaks about the value of customers ...

 

Jack Ma once said, 'When Selling to close friends and family, no matter how much you're selling to them, they will always feel you're earning their money, no matter how cheap you sell to them, they still wouldn't appreciate it.'

There will always be people who do not care about your Costs, Time, Effort, they rather let other people cheat them, allowing others to earn, then supporting someone they know. Cause in their heart, they will always be thinking, 'How much did he earn from me?' instead of "How much did he SAVE/MAKE for me?"

This is a classic example of a poor person's mentality!

How did the rich people become rich? One of the main reason is because they are willing to SUPPORT their associates business, taking care of one another's interests thus naturally they get back more.

Your Friends will in turn support you, thus the circle of wealth continues to grow and grow!

Simple Logic, you will start to get rich once you understand it.

Jack Ma on Sales: 'When doing Sales, the first people who will trust you will be Strangers, Friends will be shielding against you, fair-weather friends will distance from you. Family will look down upon you.'

The day you finally succeed, paying the bill for every get-together dinner, entertainment, you will realised: Everyone else is present except the Strangers.

Do you get the meaning of this?

We need to treat our dear Strangers better! And even more so to Friends who know what you are doing and yet still SUPPORT you!

Let us treat STRANGERS who buys from us better from today. They are your BEST customers!

The Greatest Barriers to Growth, According to Executives

A large, iconic multinational is now struggling to keep growing while being chased by leaner, more aggressive competitors. To find the next wave of growth, they were taking a hard look at their bureaucracy.
“When I joined the company, the front line management jobs were the best,” the CEO told us. He had started his career in one of those jobs, as a country manager, and worked his way up. “It was like running a small business with only a few targets on performance and obeying the rules.” Today, he confessed, “it is the worst job.”

It takes more than 10 approvals for front line managers to get a green light for any investment, and many have tacked to the wall a whole sheet of targets, requirements, weekly and monthly templates to fill out and submit to different corporate offices.

No surprise, the data reflected this struggle: Employee loyalty at the front line was the lowest in the company. The key product and customer jobs no longer attracted the best talent. Headcount in the corporate office had grown at more than twice the rate of the rest of the company over the past decade, and people with the least contact with the front line were making a larger share of the decisions than ever before. After seeing this data presented, the CEO left the meeting committed to reversing course.

It’s a common story in business today. Eighty-five percent of executives say that the greatest barriers to achieving their growth objectives lie inside their own four walls, according to research by Bain & Company. In the largest companies, this rises to 94 percent of executives who believe that their most difficult challenges are internal, not external.

Our analysis showed something else, too: Most of these barriers resulted from complexity and bureaucracy that had accumulated as these leaders scaled up their businesses. The pattern holds true for some of the most studied cases of sudden business declines, like Nokia losing out to Apple or Sony getting out maneuvered in video cameras by GoPro. The stall-outs point more to a loss of internal metabolism, speed, self-awareness, sense of urgency, and general bloat of staff rather than any outside factors they may have missed.

We call this dynamic the “Growth Paradox:” Growth creates complexity and yet complexity is the number one killer of profitable growth. You cannot win on the outside, in the marketplace, if you are losing on the inside, with an organization stifled by its own growth. But what can you do about it?

A first step is to understand the five ways that bureaucracy distorts behavior in your company. You can think of these distortions as a set of lenses to focus your attack on this chronic disease of maturing companies.

Distortion of speed: Young, founder-led companies often set the speed in their competitive arenas—speed to recognize the need to change, interpret how, decide on what, and react. Young insurgents whose speed allows them to get “inside” of the decision cycle of a large, slow incumbent competitor can reap an enormous advantage. Think of how fast Netflix is adding new programming and changing the game of television versus traditional networks. Speed is measurable and can be benchmarked. But as companies grow, they become sclerotic, like the company described by the CEO at the start of this article.

One simple way to maintain speed as your company grows is by having fewer, higher impact meetings. An example is the Monday Meeting used by L Brands, the company run by Les Wexner, cited by HBR last year as the CEO with the best unadjusted financial performance in the world. L Brands companies, like Victoria’s Secret, have Monday meetings with all of the most influential management members present (or on the phone) to review the major initiatives and to ferret out blockages to progress. A Tuesday follow-up call is used to see whether the blockages are being removed. One senior manager told us: “You never miss it. It is the most disciplined thing we do. It has morphed to ‘we can’t live without it.’”

Distortion of motive: Young organizations have no place to hide and the founder knows everything. Meritocracy can flourish when things are transparent. Yet, as companies grow, promotions fall in line with corporate processes, complex “balanced” scorecards of performance, and regression to the mean. Companies that have lost meritocracy often turn into political organizations where how you look and sound can trump what you actually do.

Yet, the loss of meritocracy is not inevitable as companies grow. One of the best organizations at maintaining meritocracy and the “owner’s mentality” is AB InBev, the world’s largest beer company. “There is no delegation and little tolerance for excuses,” Jo Van Biesbroeck, former head of strategy and one of AB InBev’s longest-serving employees, told us recently. “You either perform or not; you are paid for solutions, not effort.” Simple targets, no places to hide, and simple communication is where it starts.

Distortion of time: Our colleague Michael Mankins recently calculated the cost of an executive committee meeting at one large company: preparation across departments for the meeting—backup books, power point presentations, pre-meetings, rehearsals—added up to 300,000 hours. This is probably more hours than some start-ups expend in a year to manage their entire firm.

Several practices can help prevent the take-over of executive agendas by the tyranny of the corporate calendar, including the imposition of rules on meeting length, number of attendees, or composition (no large meetings without the decision-maker present). However, it starts with self-awareness. Management teams should study how they use their time as carefully as how they use their money, starting with three questions: How much time do they spend with top customers? How much time do they spend with high potential employees? How much time do they spend on solving the firm’s top five challenges? Teams that ask themselves these questions honestly will quickly see the first step to take.

Distortion of decisions: A number of years ago we studied in detail how the most important decisions like product approvals were made at a large pharmaceutical firm. The results shocked the management team, revealing that nearly seven in ten decisions involved a process that the participants could not describe with a wide range of views on who the decision maker was.

Start your assault on the decision distortions of bureaucracy with your five or ten most important types of decisions. Map out how they are really made and how many people are involved. Then attack what will emerge clearly as obvious root causes of distortion: decisions that should be pushed to the front line with a few vital guiding principles; decisions that should have many fewer people involved; and decisions where it’s unclear who actually decides. This approach can re-empower the front line and renew the owner’s mindset at large companies.

Distortion of information: In a company’s early years, the founding team knows the customers by name and the products in detail. Intimacy and ground level knowledge are second nature. Yet, as companies grow this becomes increasingly difficult. Customer names give way first to customer group averages and then to summaries of research interpreted and re-interpreted as it flows up through layers to the desks of the senior team, sometimes diminishing the role of insurgent, smaller competitors or of customers who are the “canaries in the coal mine” of market challenge.

Haier, one of the world’s leading appliance companies, has built its organization around the goal of its founder Zhang Ruimin to reduce the distance between the CEO and the front line. The underlying principle is to push as many decisions as possible down to the place where the ground-level information exists—in this case, down to a network of semi-autonomous teams.

But there are other, simpler ways to renew this aspect of a founder’s mentality and its connection to the front line. We have seen management teams benefit greatly from setting up ways for them to “drop in” on customer calls, or call-center service discussions. Some teams have insisted that every discussion of the marketplace begin with actual named customers. Others have set up fast feedback surveys of front line employees (in Bain’s case, we survey every project team every two weeks, down to the most junior analyst, and make the data available), with the requirement that all issues be discussed within a week.

Vague attacks on bureaucracy are not precise enough to renew a company efficiently. You must disable the specific root causes and measure the impact on these five outcomes. It is not enough to address organizational layers and managers, because the most lasting results come from reversing the deep distortions of bureaucracy to rekindle a founder’s mentality.

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Chris Zook is a partner in Bain & Company’s Boston office and has been a co-head of the firm’s global strategy practice for twenty years. He is a co-author of a number of bestselling books including Profit from the Core and The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth (Harvard Business Review Press, June 2016).

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The Sales Secrets of High Growth Companies

What distinguishes sales organizations at fast-growing companies from their lagging peers? In a wide-ranging survey of more than 1,000 companies, we unearthed five meaningful differences:

1. Commitment to the future

That the world is changing ever more quickly may be a cliché, but that makes it no less true: all sales leaders know that they need to anticipate changes that could turn into opportunities or threats. Yet the best leaders move beyond acknowledgement to commitment.

They make trend analysis a formal part of the sales process through systematic investments of time, money, and people. Building and sustaining the capability to take a forward-looking view of the market is not easy. In discussions with more than 200 sales leaders while researching our new book, Sales Growth, two common characteristics emerged: the mind-set of sales leadership and resource commitment.

Sales leaders must consistently monitor the macro-environment in search of sales opportunities, no easy task given the relentless pressure to hit near-term targets. Forward planning must be part of someone’s job description—not just part of top management’s lengthy to-do list—with sufficient resources to take advantage of the best opportunities. Companies have to be willing to take risks now to create sales capacity long before the revenue will materialize. More than half of the fast-growing companies¹ we analyzed look at least one year out, and 10 percent look more than three years out.

After planning, sales leaders aren’t afraid to put their money where they think the growth will be: 45 percent of fast-growing companies invest more than 6 percent of their sales budget on activities supporting goals that are at least a year out—a significant commitment in an environment where sales leaders fight for each dollar of investment.

[For more, read HERE ...]