EP188: Bottlenecks Beware: Flow Rates Coming to Crash the Party!
Chris unravels the enchanting world of manufacturing. Gone are the days of painstakingly crafting artifacts one by one, like our Stone Age ancestors. Now, we’re immersed in the art of flow manufacturing, where tanks channel the flow of chemicals, and even discreet manufacturing dances to the rhythm of flow. It’s a symphony of efficiency where our sales teams manufacture opportunities, creating the invaluable currency of option value.
Chris urges us to view our sales organizations as factories where identifying bottlenecks and maximizing flow rates are the keys to success. In this world, conversion rates become the icing on the cake, but only after we’ve mastered the flow.
Finally, Chris challenges the age-old debate of quality versus quantity and reminds us that we’re left with nothing without quantity. Join us for this episode, “Bottlenecks Beware: Flow Rates Coming to Crash the Party!”
Links from this episode:
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
Full episode transcript below:
(00:19):
In this episode, Chris unravels the enchanting world of manufacturing. Gone are the days of painstakingly crafting artifacts one by one like our Stone Age ancestors. Now, we’re immersed in the art of flow manufacturing, where tanks channel the flow of chemicals, and even discrete manufacturing dances to the rhythm of flow. It’s a symphony of efficiency where our sales teams manufacture opportunities, creating the invaluable currency of option value.
(00:49):
Chris urges us to view our sales organizations as factories where identifying bottlenecks and maximizing flow rates are the key to success. In this world, conversion rates become the icing on the cake, but only after we’ve mastered flow. Finally, Chris challenges the age-old debate of quality versus quantity, and reminds us that without quantity we’re left with nothing.
(01:11):
Join us for this episode, Bottlenecks Beware. Flow rates coming to crash the party.
(01:20):
Hey. Everybody, Susan Finch here, sitting in for Corey Frank on Market Dominance Guys. I’m here with Chris Beall. And today, we’re going to go a little bit deeper on the topic of flow rates, conversion rates. Time is the denominator that counts, not the dials, not the emails, not whatever else you think it might be, not the voodoo, whooo, magic, whatever. Chris, you really wanted to get into the specifics, the specifics of flow rate. So let’s really go into that one piece of it.
Chris Beall (01:54):
You bet. So I’m an old manufacturing guy. I come out of the world of manufacturing software. I used to write build systems for manufacturers. And when you get into manufacturing, you realize that what’s amazing about it is, hey, folks have actually figured out how to build stuff through flow processes, not just through one at a time building something, that is through most of human history. If there was an artifact, somebody made that artifact from end to end.
Susan Finch (02:24):
Right.
Chris Beall (02:24):
And they would shape a spearpoint or something. I just saw a picture yesterday of some people who still are living that life, that Stone Age life, and they’re making those spear points out of dirt or flint or whatever they make them out of, flaking them and doing this.
Susan Finch (02:39):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (02:40):
And it’s a shaping process where what you just made determines what you can make. If you break your piece of stone that you’re using inappropriately in the wrong place, well, you got to start over.
Susan Finch (02:52):
Right.
Chris Beall (02:53):
So now, we manufacture things through… Even discrete manufacturing, which we would consider to be one at a time. You’re making something like an iPhone, or a computer, or a chair, or whatever it is, and I’m distinguishing that from true flow manufacturing. So a company like Huish Chemical that I used to work with in Salt Lake City, they were a flow manufacturer. That means they had tanks into which things would flow and they’d flow down sort of a channel and get mixed with other chemicals, and it would flow, right?
Susan Finch (03:25):
Right.
Chris Beall (03:26):
But even discreet manufacturing where you’re taking parts and putting them together one at a time, two at a time, three at a time, robots, all that kind of stuff, it’s still a flow business. And if you want to make it better, we always want to make our sales better, our sales process, our sales teams more efficient, we need to look at it like manufacturing. Because what we’re doing is we’re manufacturing opportunities in the pipeline. That’s the main thing that we should be doing in sales in our company. We might think of it as manufacturing customers or manufacturing deals, but those are both unreliable processes with incredibly high scrap rates and a lot of variability in terms of what goes in to make that thing work.
(04:10):
But if we’re manufacturing enough opportunities in the pipeline, life is good, because we have choices. And when we have choices, we have what’s called option value. The greatest value we get in business is always option value. So there’s a thing called a zero-cost option. You don’t pay anything, but it’s worth something. Well, pipeline is not a zero-cost option. It costs something. You have to pay people to do things like call people and stuff like that. But improving flow rates themselves that is making your pipeline work better by going to the bottleneck and doing something about the flow rate there makes a big difference.
(04:47):
Now, here’s how people think about sales, especially at the top of the funnel, where the shape of the funnel tells you it’s getting harder, I have to squeeze more stuff through there, and I got to get stuff out of there and do all that kind of stuff. So it’s like, okay, so here I have the top of the funnel, and we’re working the top of the funnel, and they care about conversion rates. They want to know for a certain number of inputs, say, a account of records that are coming in. I buy a bunch of data from ZoomInfo. Or I make a bunch of phone calls to those people. What percentage of those converted to the next stage? That’s what folks get obsessed with.
Susan Finch (05:22):
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(06:10):
And we’re back.
Chris Beall (06:11):
And I deal with this every day. In my job, I talk to folks who are using ConnectAndSell to call lots and lots of people. And they’ll say, “Does your product affect our conversion rates?” And I say, “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t at all.” And they go, “Well, why would I bother to buy something that doesn’t affect our conversion rates? I want to know that we’re going to get more meetings per conversation or more conversations per dial.” And I say, “Well, we don’t do anything about that. What we give you is more conversations per hour, per rep.” And that’s the constrained resource. The rep who’s capable of talking to somebody during given period of time, and taking them from, “We don’t know anything about your company,” to “Now we’re more interested than we were before,” on our way to engaging or actually engaged. So that’s a flow rate question.
(07:03):
The denominator is time. The denominator is not the number of calls, it’s not the number of emails. All those things are treated, I think, incorrectly as being somehow fixed. So for instance, the notion that we could only make so many dials. Well, actually, that’s not true. You could have more resources making more dials at the same time. There’s other ways of cracking this problem. Just because you used to walk doesn’t mean that somebody else can’t invent a car. Once the car is there, you’re going to compete to get somewhere. You better get yourself a car. Walking ain’t going to get it done. Right?
Susan Finch (07:40):
Right.
Chris Beall (07:40):
Good for you. So flow rates are where it’s at. And conversion rates are nice once you have flow rates. But looking at conversion rates first gives you nothing, except it makes you go in circles. You keep trying to squeeze more out of something that you could have just gotten more of in the first place. And I find it a little bit frustrating, I guess, to talk to people who are very sophisticated in the world of building sales pipeline who will only talk about conversion rates. “We send so many emails, and we have this open rate.” That’s a conversion rate. And then they go to tools that’ll let them send more emails, but there’s limits to that and called spam at some point.
Susan Finch (08:26):
Right.
Chris Beall (08:26):
So it’s fascinating to me. If you think of your sales organization as a factory and you think of your sales process as a manufacturing process, you’ll look at it in terms of, “Can I find the bottleneck? What’s the flow rate through that bottleneck, the number of units per hour it’s producing?” And then in the case of manufacturing meetings, for instance, “Well, what are the number of meetings per hour you’re producing? If it’s conversations that might lead somebody to your website, how many conversations per hour are you producing?” Those are the flow rates. And the conversion rates, well, once you’ve got flow rates kind of maximized, or where you want to them, then you can tweak conversion. You have something to work with. But you don’t have anything to work with until you got the flow.
Susan Finch (09:13):
I hear what you just said from, not just people that are into sales prospecting, sales training, it’s maddening because they don’t back it out enough. Well, what led to that? Okay. Well, what led to that? And it does come down to the same thing, how are you increasing the effectiveness, the efficiencies of your sales force?
Chris Beall (09:37):
Yeah. Yeah. The order in which to do things is to increase efficiency first.
Susan Finch (09:42):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (09:42):
Because that gives you your raw material to address effectiveness. And I hear this one all the time too. I’ve probably done a whole show on the quality versus quantity thing.
(09:51):
I think I wrote an article once, the title of which was Quality Versus Quantity Versus Nothingness. And the point of the article was, look, just because it is easy to talk about quality and quantity as though they’re somehow independent, and you could raise quality arbitrarily without quantity, the fact of the matter is that without quantity, you’ve got nothing. There’s nothing to improve the quality of.
(10:15):
This is why markets get flooded first with cheap cars, and then people work to make them better and better, but the ones who got the cheap cars there first win. This is why the whole SaaS industry exists. All SaaS products are built on this premise, which is, “We’re going to get a lot of it out there, and then we’re going to get feedback, and we’re going to work to make it more valuable across the many,” rather than, “We’re going to go find one big fantastic customer and work with them for 50 years, and it’ll be great.” Well, it’ll be great, and you won’t be worth much. So if it’s a hobby, go ahead and do it that way. But you need quantity first, and quantity over time is flow. Simple as that.
Susan Finch (10:58):
I think that that is a great wrap-up to this episode. This was… We wanted something targeted, and you did it. This is all about flow rates. If you want to find your bottleneck, folks, you got to be looking in the right place. You have to be looking back a little bit further than just counting those conversions, than just counting the emails that are opened. Whenever you consider a conversion, that isn’t where it starts.
