In lean manufacturing, waste is any expense or effort that is expended but which does not transform raw materials into an item the customer is willing to pay for. By optimizing process steps and eliminating waste, only true value is added at each phase of production.
This concept applies directly to sales as well. And a key measure of waste is win rate. Consider this: if I have a 60% win rate, that means I have 40% waste in my process. Why is waste in the sales process a big deal? Because sellers are working with limited resources. It’s their time and the opportunity cost of working on losing deals when their time would be better spent on deals more likely to win. But something they often don’t consider is the use of finite resources that support their efforts: sales engineers, project managers, proposal writers, finance, legal, etc. So there is a multiplier effect.
So what is the cause of the problem? One of the main culprits I’ve seen in this regard is poor qualification and discovery at the front end of the sales process. Deals that never had a reasonable chance to win move to the proposal stage that either weren’t qualified well or should have been disqualified had thorough discovery been done.
