Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Making Customers Instead of Finding Them
In the March '08 White Paper entitled “Making Customers Instead of Finding Them,” (Click here if you have not read it) I suggested that the role of a sales person is being squeezed between the converging trends of “information via internet” and a slowing economy. If customer demand for your products and services begin to dry up and what little demand that survives can be serviced by a more cost effective way, what happens to the role of the sales professional? I suggest it must evolve from the old traditional role of Demand Capturer to a role of Demand Creator as defined in the White Paper. Do you agree? I further stipulate that most Business-to-Business sales organizations have an old archaic Sales Process that will not support this new role of a Sales professional. Do you believe this? Are we witnessing the metamorphic change of the sales professional at this time in history? Share your point of view!
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5 comments:
The economic trend suggests that if Sales Leadership isn't working diligently on shifting the emphasis to proactive demand creation...it will soon be too late. Funnels/pipelines will narrow, deals will slip, pricing/margin pressure will intensify, and companies will be disrupted. The profession of selling has changed....its now time for sales people to truly become Business Development Rainmakers.
I agree, but I would submit that this is an area that's challenging for the sales department to handle on their own. The attitude shift needs to take place at the beginning of the product development cycle. We have begun an experiment: trying fewer focus groups in determining new product lines.
To truly create demand, we're trying to come up with ideas for products that they don't realize they need yet and wouldn't know to ask for. But if we do it properly, we will have made life much easier for our sales department. It's the old idea of revolutionary vs. evolutionary.
This is interesting. I think the need to "create" demand has been been simmering for some time. Of course, the pressure to deliver "this quarter" means that the focus is skewed towards the classic fire drills of "must win deals", "war rooms" etc etc when we DOUBLE our attention on every deal. Businesses are impatient and looking for a quick fix. If there was a "quick fix" I guess we'd have all done it. You have stabbed my conscience.
I am the sales trainer at my company. My manager is very process-oriented, and has little sales experience in his background. As an engineer and a pilot, he thinks linnearly with a step-by-step and checklist mindset. All of this in the demand capturing mode, and it makes things difficult. So I do my best to inject thought leadership into the picture and train our salesteam on facilitation skills in an effort to tip-toe into demand creation. Can anyone offer some advice on how to take some baby steps toward a shift in our approach to sales?
Much aprreciated.
The essential problem here is the idea of "process", which implies something end to end. Business processes can minimise error and increase predictability of outcomes, but to do that they need consistent inputs. Now that works in symmetrical environments, but selling is by definition asymmetric...it's to do with change and the behaviour of human beings; how asymmetric can you get?
Unfortunately, business units frequently become slaves to process as it morphs from the means to the end. Organisations become input rather than output-centric and ultimately unresponsive to markets, customers, salespeople etc (the “ends”).
I'd suggest then that instead of process, salespeople need to focus on "methods" and "strategy" (itself a method). To use a military metaphor; Special Forces gear themselves to asymmetric environments by being very adaptable. They are highly trained in a variety of methods and operate as small flexible teams. They create strategy in response to rapidly changing circumstances, which involves mixing and matching methods on the ground. This compares with conventional bulky forces that are trained for set piece warfare and well-defined processes…thousands doing their own thing would be disastrous. Their strategy is created at "head office".
Selling today has a lot in common with set-piece warfare. Marketing carpet bombs the environment; there’s a 3% hit rate and loads of collateral damage. Then the foot soldiers (sales) enter theatre with the same weapons (product-oriented methods) they have always used and are confronted with a punch drunk and cynical market.
This hasn’t been helped by IT, who have effectively hijacked many business processes (I must fess up at this point to being in IT myself), for example in sales it is CRM and SFA. Why, once upon a time, Customer Relationship Management was a business activity not software!
Unfortunately IT has created many so-called "solutions" simply because it could, not because they were needed; Salesforce “Automation” (SFA) for example. The general idea of process automation is to balance the relative strengths/weakness of people (intelligent, but slow and inaccurate) with those of computers (dumb, but fast and accurate). Which begs the question where does dumb and fast sit in selling? Yes, you're right...what we’ve ended up with!
Seriously though, effective sales people "create environments in which people buy". They use methods such as researching, creating trust, listening, investigating, challenging, advising and so on. Many training companies (such as Revenue Storm I'd imagine, although I'm not personally familiar with them) teach these methods and also strategy, which is the framework to deploy those methods i.e. getting into a winning position.
So to answer your question, I’d suggest you start training in and using sound methods, the pieces rather than the whole if you like. As each method becomes second nature to your team, you have had a win that you can build upon. Then, instead of creating a process (like a road) establish checkpoints that are like waypoints navigators use e.g. your pilot boss. His flight plans (strategy) may have dictated a path to waypoints, but he was always situationally aware and navigated around obstacles. Often the same journey had a different route but similar waypoints
The bottom line is, the shortest distance between two points is of no use if it means missing the final destination. What salespeople need is the most effective route…the one that achieves the desired outcome at each checkpoint so that they inevitably end up at the right destination...the sale!
So why do I care? Well, I mentioned IT…we have developed a unique sales intelligence system that enables enterprises to embed sound sales methods (whatever they may be), so each salesperson can do what works on a customer by customer, buyer by buyer basis.
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