By dissecting the long and complicated sales process into smaller units of analysis, you can better control the entire process. These bite-sized steps are more understandable, measurable, and actionable. They are more easy to manage. Practically, this means looking beyond just sales close percentages or your sales reps’ quarterly numbers; measure their activity daily or hourly, look at each minute action that leads to a close. The same goes for the many steps, touchpoints, and complex interactions in the marketing process as a whole. We call this the ‘Nanotechnology of Marketing’. By breaking these complex and chaotic systems down into discrete steps, you are able to measure the unmeasurable and manage the unmanageable. The idea is to apply ‘scientific management’ and the innovations of industrial engineering and operations to the sales and marketing processes. Marketing is arguably much harder to control than an assembly line, but improvements to it can also be much more significant.
