Lean Six Sigma in Sales - Yin Yang -: Need for a common language

By Antti Leijala

This book is dedicated to Lean Six Sigma (L6S) as well as Sales process development professionals. Over the past several years I’ve personally experienced that one of the biggest reasons for Lean Six Sigma methods not being widely deployed in sales environment is the lack of common language between these two stakeholder groups. This triggered an idea to collect my thoughts in a book, or rather a dictionary, and thus share the benefits also to a wider audience.

By adoption of these ~20 comparisons (which takes you 30-60min), you’ve already taken a major step forward. You’re ready to move ahead with your L6S sales improvement initiative with the right mindset.
- Solution Selling vs. L6S sales
- Waste vs. opportunity
- Mitigate vs. elaborate
- VoC=VoB vs. VoC≠VoB
- Red vs Blue Ocean
- Manual vs. automated data
- Our company vs. competition
- High vs. low confidence level
- Standardize vs. improvise
- Lost vs. won
- Backward vs. forward
- Large/medium vs. small
- L6S vs. sales training
- Satisfaction vs. conversion
- Theory vs. hands-on (SIPOC)
- Own vs. customer process
- Process vs. customer adherence
- Pareto vs. (80/20)n
- Root cause of issues vs. success
- FMEA vs. SMEA
- 100% vs. 200%

Lean Six Sigma (L6S) evolution is facing probably its biggest discontinuity, when applications are extending towards sales environment. This book sets the basics for a common language and mindset to bring together Lean Six Sigma and Sales professionals across the World, regardless of the industry and size of your company. These two distinguished stakeholder groups are coming from different environment, they have different education and mindset (even genes) and thus speaking the same language becomes the most critical success factor for driving L6S in sales environment (i.e. Yin Yang ).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Jun 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9789523308299

Antti Leijala

Antti Leijala, UltraLeanSales-mallin kehittäjä, on tunnettu kouluttaja, konsultti, kirjailija ja tutkija. Hänellä on yli 20 vuoden kokemus maailmanlaajuisesta liiketoiminnasta ja hän on henkilökohtaisesti auttanut yli 250 Suomalaista yritystä, yli 200 toimialalla, parantamaan liiketoiminta- ja myyntisuorituskykyään. Hänen intohimonsa on auttaa B2B-yrityksiä parantamaan myyntiprosessin tehokkuutta, erityisesti voittosuhteen mittarilla. Lue lisää Antin taustasta hänen LinkedIn-profiilista (https://www.linkedin.com/in/anttileijala/) ja lähetä kutsupyyntö aloittaaksesi henkilökohtaisen keskustelun.

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Quiz

Discontinuity - need for a common language

Lean Six Sigma¹ (L6S) evolution is facing probably its biggest discontinuity, when applications are extending towards sales environment (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Discontinuity in Lean Six Sigma evolution.

But if we talk about roughly the same L6S toolbox, what makes it so different? It’s the language, or many would call it the mindset. This book sets the basics for a common language and mindset to bring together Lean Six Sigma and Sales professionals across the World, regardless of the industry and size of your company.

Figure 2. Lean Six Sigma and Sales methodologies merging together.

These two distinguished stakeholder groups are coming from different environment (Figure 2), they have different education and mindset (even genes) and thus speaking the same language becomes the most critical success factor for driving L6S in sales environment (i.e. Yin Yang²).

While there’re several great books written on L6S sales³,⁴,⁵,⁶,⁷, we’re still somewhat missing the key to wider deployment of L6S in sales environment and thus also missing a huge business potential.

The purpose of this book is to bridge Sales and L6S professionals, i.e. improve our correlation, regardless of how large our improvement initiative is and which corner we start from (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. We need to have common language Yin Yang between sales and L6S professionals.

Each chapter compares L6S mainstream vs. L6S sales view to a sub-topic. This includes explanation of the topic from L6S mainstream viewpoint (using the language of L6S professionals, i.e. quality community) and from L6S sales viewpoint (using the language of sales professionals).

Note: This book is not a deep dive into Lean Six Sigma nor any other mentioned methods such