Justin Roff-Marsh - The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function

Advance praise

We doubled our top-line revenue in the year following our implementation of The Machine and are applying these same concepts to an international company we just acquired and seeing the same sort of gains in effectiveness. Justins book is providing us with an even deeper understanding of the principles that changed our company and continue to drive our sales.

Aubrey Meador, President of ARCA

Theres no reason for the sales department to be the least predictable and most chaotic part of a company. The Machine brings order by removing non-sales work from salespeople and replacing it with centralized scheduling, standardized workflows, specialized resources and formalized management. The Machine offers a proven system for growing sales in an organized, consistent way.

Andrew Warner, Founder of Mixergy

The pioneering work of Justin Roff-Marsh in the design and execution of effective sales machines is, in my view, world leading. Organizations who ignore it in the connected, globally competitive twenty-first century do so at their peril.

John Lyons, independent company director
and coauthor of Marketing without Money

In his provocative book, The Machine , Justin Roff-Marsh has thoughtfully and forcefully challenged the status quo as it pertains to the design of the sales function. Some readers will be angry, some dismissive, and a select few will be enlightened by this alternative approach. We fall in the latter camp and have found Justins approach to be a true asset for growing sales in todays complex selling environment!

Mike Schleyhahn, President of Swagelok San Diego

The Machine will challenge everything you know about the sales process! It makes a lot of sense, passes all the logical tests, and in the end, might just keep you awake at night. We worked hard to implement a number of these concepts in our organization and I can attest that the ideas are valid and the payoffs are real.

Jeff Stuart, President of Hydra-Power Systems Inc.

Justins approach to addressing the tired structure of traditional sales environments is nothing short of revolutionary. The Machine shows management how to drive growth with a tightly synchronized machine, as an alternative to herding individual salespeople. Theres no question that this book will be a great investment for any executive that runs a sales team.

Paul ODwyer, author and business growth coach

Justins book is a delight. Justin translates the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts to sales, demonstrating that there is a substantially better way to sell compared to simply summing the sales of each salesperson in a team.

Humberto R. Baptista, CEO of Vectis-Solutions
and lecturer at TOC Schools

As an operations guy, Im driven by process, efficiency, and repeatability. The notion that the sales function is an art immune from the rigors of process has never sat well with me. The Machine shatters that myth. The Machine is a must read for any business leader wanting to achieve predictable results from their sales function.

Marc Allman, COO of AMS Controls

Justin Roff-Marsh gets to the root causes of underperforming sales quickly and succinctly. It is clear he knows sales inside and out and has thought deeply about the professions problems. The book is both global in its implications for sales and practical in its applications for selling.

Charles Coury, President of 9Wood

We have worked with Justin and his team for the past seven months and I am continually impressed with the teams professionalism and knowledge. I am certain by the end of this year we will have a full working model of the sales machine in place, and it will be producing the same results as we have seen already in our customer service department. I am convinced we are moving in the right direction to improve sales within our company.

Jim OConnell, President of Hotsy Pacific

We look at business books every hour, every day. The Machine was a welcome standout. Soundview votes by a large committee on which books we are going to select as the 30 Best Business Books of the Year. The Machine got a unanimous Yes vote. That rarely happens.

Rebecca Clement,
Publisher of Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Justin stands on the shoulders of a giant and uses the tools of Dr Goldratts TOC to focus on the effective management of what will be the principal constraint of all businesses sooner or later in the 21 st Century. Justin inspires the necessary cultural change within companiesnot only entering into a convincing discussion of what to change and why, but also what to change to and how. The energy and stamina required to make such a change should not be underestimated but, provided you have the courage, The Machine provides the direction.

Andrew Jackson, Chief Executive at Triumph Furniture

Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press

Austin, Texas

www.gbgpress.com

The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function

Copyright 2015 Justin Roff-Marsh

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

Distributed by Greenleaf Book Group

For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Greenleaf Book Group at PO Box 91869, Austin, TX 78709, 512.891.6100.

Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group and Kimberly Lance

Ebook Conversion by Ramesh Kumar Pitchai

Authors photograph by SmartShoot.com and Eric Stracke

Publishers Cataloging Publication Data is available.

e-ISBN: 978-0-692-50430-7

15 16 17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

Dedicated to
Warren and Sylvia Roff-Marsh
who instilled in me a love of reading

and

Bo Hye Roff-Marsh
who is always the first to read each page I write

Contents

Acknowledgments

I must first thank Ballistixs, clients who have had faith in me over the last 20 years (more than has been warranted, on occasion) and who have welcomed my ongoing experiments on their businesses. These clients are among the silent revolutionaries whose stories are told on the following pages.

I thank the team at Ballistix too for diligently taking my ideas and making them work in practiceand for finding creative workarounds when reality failed to yield to my will!

And a big thank you to the late Eliyahu Goldratt and to the entire TOC community who have been early supporters and frequent contributors to sales process engineering.

Note: The names of our silent revolutionaries organizations have been changed. This enables me to share information about their experiences that would otherwise be confidential.

Introduction

The Titanic is sinking: All is not well in sales.

The sales environment in a typical organizationin most every organization, in factis seriously dysfunctional. But rather than focusing on the obvious dysfunction, management is busy with incremental improvement initiatives: sales training, sales force automation (technology of various types), or bolt-on lead-generation activities (e.g., outsourced telemarketing, social media activities). Because none of these initiatives address the root cause of the dysfunction, they amount to nothing more than arranging chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic .

And make no mistakethe Titanic is sinking!

Its not that sales is getting worse: The issue is that the rest of the organization is getting so much better while sales clings to the same structure, the same management approach, and the same practices that have been in place for the last fifty years.