What Is a Business Management System and Why Should You Use One?

If you love to learn and invest in yourself as a professional, you will be pleasantly surprised at how many great teachers are among us. In my experience, if you are genuinely interested in learning and becoming better at your job, you should ask the best and most consistent results-oriented individuals how they do what they do. As much as I advocate reading (a lot) to learn and develop yourself, there is no substitute for spending time with the best in your field and unpacking what they do so you can begin to apply it in your life.

Over the past 25 years, I have developed a set of business management tools that I use daily to drive results at the individual contributor and team level. These fundamental tools are my version of the periodic table of elements—but for sales and general management. Just as the chemical elements are the building blocks for every compound, these tools are the building blocks for business management, and they scale exceptionally well from small to rather large teams.

Lessons from the Field

As a newly minted Xerox Sales Professional (Xeriod) in the early 1990s, I was fortunate to work in a sales office with a number of very talented and results-driven individuals. Xerox was an amazing place to begin a career if you wanted to be a professional sales person. We were exposed to classroom training, read the best sales and leadership material and had on-the-job coaching and mentoring. In spite of all this, my best training came from my peers—learning about the skills, productivity tools and hacks they utilized to drive exceptional results. I learned how to use tools for organization and time management, so I could use my brain to solve problems instead.

Lesson 1: Use a CRM

The early to mid-1990s was not an era of sophisticated CRM tools like Salesforce.com, HubSpot, Optimizely, Kapost, etc. When you had meetings with prospects and customers, you put their business cards in a binder with the other cards you collected at meetings. You wrote notes about the meetings and action items, and you put them in files that you stored in a filing cabinet! Insane, right?

My fellow Xeriod in those early days, Scott Rusnak, introduced me to a piece of contact management software called Act!. That’s when I began to see the power of CRM solutions for preventing meeting-related brain overload. With Act!, I would take business cards and notes from a meeting and input them into my computer. It was a huge organizing step forward to go through the simple process of tracking on my computer who I met with, what we accomplished and what the next steps were. I could now easily search what happened in the last meeting, who attended, what was expected and the stated outcomes. No longer was I wasting time searching for information or trying to remember what happened at my last meeting. I was able to use my brain to think about solutions to help solve the customer problems instead of trying to remember what happened at the last meeting.

Leap forward to 2016 and I now know how critical SFDC (salesforce.com) is for being effective and productive as a sales leader and contributor. I am thankful for having learned early on the habits that drive me to utilize software tools to help me run my business more effectively. These habits have allowed me to build an effective business management system (BMS), the framework of systems and tools that gives me (and anyone else who uses one) a real competitive and performance advantage.

Lesson 2: Manage Your Time

My second big learning hack came from Mike Stemler, who at the time (mid-90s) was managing the City of Edmonton School Board accounts and individual schools. Mike was the most consistent sales person I had meet in my short career. I was fortunate enough to get promoted to the team he was on, and every month he hit or exceeded his number. My new assignment had me calling on all the regional school boards and schools that were outside of the City of Edmonton. I had two major challenges in front of me when I took this assignment: the physical size of my sales territory, and figuring out how to exceed Mike’s results.

The rural schools and boards spanned hundreds of square miles, so I could make a limited number of visits per day to identify opportunities and present proposals. We did not use Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangouts or products from Cisco to call on customers. We drove our cars in all types of weather every day and brought printed out proposals to share with potential and current clients.

This assignment was different than my first two at Xerox where the organizational hacks helped me to hit and exceed my sales targets. In this assignment, I was dealing with major constraints on my time due to distance and much tougher competition for these high-value customers. In the first four months of the assignment, I did not win any new accounts. I even lost a number of current customers to competitors, including Canon and Sharp. I was super frustrated because I felt I was more organized than ever and I put in long hours traveling every day to visit schools and generate proposals. I did the only thing I thought I could do at that point, which was to ask the most successful person on my team for help! I asked Mike if he would review my proposals and offer any suggestions.

Mike was an amazing teacher and very generous with his time. Through his coaching and mentoring, Mike taught me that great teachers don’t ask you to memorize or copy. They help you better understand the problem and give you a set of tools to build a solution. He trained me on time management tools that helped me deliver amazing results over the next 12 months. These tools seem awfully basic today, but at the time they were a game-changer.

Mike had me build a spreadsheet breaking my territory into the six school boards I managed. We listed the schools by proximity to each other using driving routes, and we captured all of the critical copier and fax information like age, total number of copies / faxes made, capabilities, lease expiry, manufacturer, sales rep and key decision-maker information. Thanks to my use of Act!, I was quickly pulled this information together. I built a territory management system that gave me control back over my time. By helping me organize my job assignment this way, Mike showed me how to utilize data as I never had before. I started to see data as a tool for building competitive advantage. All I had to do was identify patterns.

With my critical information newly organized, I identified that one school board had had a set of competitor copiers installed four years prior, all sold by the same salesperson. Most copiers at the time were on 3- to 5-year leases, schools typically having the latter. I shared this observation with Mike, who told me about a strategy he used in the City Schools to replace an entire competitive fleet of copiers. He did not sell on technical specs, but instead sold solutions based on use cases experienced by the key decision-makers at the school. Now I was armed with insights from data, lessons from prior deals and coaching from the best person in the office.

I put my lessons into practice and visited every school in that board. I created relationships with each of the key decision-makers, built a flexible proposal that met the needs of each school and knocked out the entire fleet of Canon copiers over a four-month period.

Because I was disciplined about managing my time and organizing my work, I had time to think—and that’s when the really big problems get solved. At that time in my career, hitting my number was a really big problem. I found a system that allowed me to solve it.

I tell my teams that if you don’t have a management system, you will never get to leverage the data. I remember hearing in one of my favorite podcasts from Tim Ferriss that if you optimize a bad process, you just get bad output faster! It’s true. Faster or more is not always better—the key is to utilize data to be in control of your time. I build a time management system into my BMS by breaking a 52-week calendar into weeks, months and quarters. At minimum, I plan all critical events for the quarter, my annual vacation time and any key events. I update this calendar every week. I can evaluate it against my priorities for the quarter and allocate my time accordingly, readjusting as necessary.

Lesson 3: Manage Deals and Inspect Pipeline

When I joined PTC (Parametric Technology Corp) in the mid-90s, I got my doctorate in deal management! I learned how important it was to be super proud of the products I sold, and that no deal-related detail was too small to ignore. To this day I use the systems PTC in place to inspect deals and qualify opportunities. There is plenty of information online about MEDDIC, but it’s only part of the solution. MEDDIC won’t drive results without the right sales and pipeline management processes and protocols. Every salesperson must be brutally honest about the status of a deal and what help is needed to get it closed.

Today’s CRMs like Salesforce.com are only as good as the workflows designed into them and their user adoption rates. Recently I added a step to our workflow that before a deal can move past 50% in SFDC, there must be an executive in-person meeting to discuss the deal and the approval process. This meeting happens after I or one of my executives calls the customer and thanks them for choosing our solution and confirming that they are signing the PO and securing the funds. This call generates a number of responses and usually helps drive serious qualification into the deal. You would be surprised at the different answers you get at this point in the sales process.

As part of your BMS, you need to be able to review the deals that will drive your quarterly number each week and have a consistent set of data points demonstrating momentum in the deal or what work needs to be done to move it forward. At Dell I worked for a number of great General Managers who ran large and diverse teams. Two of these were Paul Cooper in Canada and Phil Bryant in the US. Both had unbelievable control over their businesses and were very rarely surprised by an outcome. More often than not, they could engineer an over-plan performance every quarter. Both used systems to inspect the business on a weekly basis, identifying where to invest their time and to ensuring all resources were focused on the deals that would drive the quarter. Without a weekly process to understand your top deals and what resources the company needs to invest to make them happen, you will have a hard time staying in control. It is only when you are in control that you have a chance to deliver over-plan results.

Both Paul and Phil demonstrated success with inspection processes across two very different markets, product offerings, sales cycles and team sizes. In Canada, Paul had a small but focused group selling enterprise solutions while in the US, Phil ran global consumer segments with call centers and outside sales teams. Both used business management systems of different complexity and design, and both delivered consistent and sustained results as top performers and gifted leaders. they created more time to develop their teams because they were in control of their time.

Lesson 4: Doing Work vs. Thinking Work

Today I use Google Sheets to run my business management system and calendar collaboration. Salesforce.com is my CRM solution and we use Slack as our messaging platform! I constantly look for tasks the team does often and ask them to document those processes, capturing the information in a shared document so we can start thinking work versus doing work. For many sales and operations teams, distinguishing between doing work and thinking work is a big first step toward getting in control. Examine the reoccurring meetings in your calendar on a weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. If you have lots of doing meetings and not enough time for introspection, planning and thinking meetings, you are most likely not in control and having a hard time getting to Planet Overplan.

The last lesson on this topic I will share with you is what I write in the front of all of my Evernote notepads. This is a great reminder about why we should put processes in place:

General Manager

• Manage today
• Manage future
• Manage people
• Manage customers

Your calendar has to reflect the four quadrants! Time is your only resource.

Management Systems are critical to managing disparate teams.

Keys to a successful sales and marketing team

• Accept accountability
• Keep commitments
• Focus on the critical few
• Be a thought leader
• Be a talent leader

Keys to sustained success

• Set priorities
• Make critical hires
• Establish business needs
• Gain support from finance team
• Set up the number to beat plan by 50%
• Hit the number with the products you have

What I have been reading:

What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further Adventures of a Curios Character by Richard P. Feynman

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

What I have been listening to:

I am finally all caught up on Tim Ferriss—you have to listen to the Jamie Foxx episode. Simply amazing!

I am up to date on StartUp, which I have been following from the beginning. This is an amazing podcast I highly recommend.

What I have I purchased that I love:

Amazon Echo: Alexa is great! What a fun product to put in your kitchen.

Hue lights from Philips: These are a game-changer for the house

I hope you enjoy this blog. Next I’ll publish an article I co-wrote with a very good friend, someone I worked with in Brasil. We will break down the business management system we used to run the consumer business in Latin America.

Happy Learning!