I have been visiting a former business partner and presented him the Multi-Moment-Analysis (MMA). He was very enthusiastic about the possibilities what you could measure and investigate with such a study. He immediately recognized the enormous potential for his department. As a sales manager of an international operating company he is managing a field and internal sales team. His main concerns are that his team is really dealing with sales oriented efforts such like sales-promoting and customer-relationship management and is not bounded by administrative tasks. – I thought “the perfect candidate”. But then the objections came up. The top management is shareholder driven. Will they support and understand such an analysis? What would be their reaction to such clear results? Until now administrative efforts have always been considered as required. In the meantime, those has grown to roughly 30% or more. I think this is the right time to ask the question if this make sense. Extending the staff to keep track with the administrative efforts, so that the same customer presence can be retain, is almost impossible. Instead of this option every year a new target is set with increasing sales and reducing costs numbers. And of course, to make it suitable for shareholder value it stays with the same or in the worst case fewer resources. Then I mentioned to him, that the beauty of an MMA study is, that you completely focus on numbers, data and facts so that all emotions are taken out of the discussion. Soft factors and fat words like "it is as it is" or "others are doing it as well" will not work anymore. Under us, if the administrative effort really involves more than 30% of the total costs and is expressed in a dollar amount I’m convinced that this number also brings a shareholder to think, if not even to react. In the truest sense, this is throwing money out of the window. Therefore, measure, analyze, improve.
Free to the quotation of Robert S. Kaplan economist at Harvard Business School
"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"
