One might describe the Sales Cycle as the time it takes to obtain an interested prospect through a customer purchase order and finally through the ongoing post-purchase customer engagement. If you look at the Sales Cycle in 3 stages, you may find it easier to look for waste in the sales process. Waste will reveal itself in time, motion, over processing and/or wasted human potential of associates.

I was recently visiting with a large major multi-national, multi-site corporation and discussing their progress in capturing energy reduction results across their enterprise’s more than 80 distribution centers. They shared with me the significant progress that they have made across their organization in lighting initiatives to drastically reduce their operating expenses utilizing best in class distribution center lighting technologies. They likewise had made progress inside their facilities in material handling equipment, shelving layouts, work flow designs and time saving technologies to expedite the touches inside the distribution center. As our conversation turned to HVAC system improvements, there was a noticeable pause. “Office HVAC system improvements and specifically cooling energy improvements inside the office have been a major focus area for years,” they shared.

Our organization has embarked on an employee engagement path that has literally caught fire throughout the company. Several Cambridge Engineering, Inc. production managers embraced the LEAN philosophy espoused by Paul Akers in his book, 2 Second Lean: How to grow people and build a lean culture. Our production team’s focus from the beginning has been on training people how to think differently. Many sophisticated books have been written on the LEAN topic. Paul’s book is not one of them. Paul details a path towards employee engagement that everyone can understand. As leader of the sales team, I have watched the trans-formative power of a LEAN mindset with our Ops team and have been inspired to apply this thinking to my life.