Global Race for Sales Talent
Top sales talent – more critical than ever, yet harder to get?
McKinsey have recently released a couple of reports that make interesting reading for many sales leaders today. In their 4th Quarter 2007 survey of Business Executives views on economic and hiring trends, they found that expectations of inflation have risen sharply, as have expectations that economic conditions will deteriorate over the next half year.
Nevertheless, many executives say they are going to continue to hire more staff and plan to raise investment in recruitment and training in the near term.
Given these two apparently conflicting views, it is reasonable to expect that the pressure will be focused onto the sales teams in the drive to generate bigger revenues and profits than ever before. Yet this all has to be achieved in the face of a deteriorating economy.
In a second McKinsey report released in February 2008, Making Talent a Strategic Priority, the finding are that whilst companies like to promote the idea that employees are their biggest source of competitive advantage, the astonishing reality is that most of them are as unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago.
This view is supported by a presentation given at the 42nd US Strategic Account Management Association conference in late 2006 by Phil Stryland, who said that following a survey of executives in 1500 corporates across the US the findings were that less than 7% of so called ‘executive sales people’ were worthy of the executive’s time.
IDC also released data in November 2007 showing research into the views of buyers in major IT & Telecom companies in the US which said that ‘vendors still do not sell the way we want to buy’. That ‘demos and inappropriate presentations were forced on them out of sync with their buying process’.
Business leaders are deeply concerned, expecting intensifying competition for talent from an increasingly global pool of employers recruiting on a world wide basis. They expect that this will have a major effect on their companies over the next five years. No other global trend was considered to be as significant.
To a considerable extent, McKinsey go on to say, executives must blame themselves for their current talent woes. Granted, shareholders and investment analysts are largely responsible for the obsession with short term performance, but managers are too ready to treat talent in a reactive, knee jerk manner – say, by hiring new sales & marketing people only when a new product has taken off. This diverts attention from longer-term issues such as talent sourcing and career development.
Since investment in talent intangibles is expensed rather than capitalized, managers may try to raise short term earnings by cutting discretionary spend on people development. This tendency though can turn into a vicious circle: a lack of talent blocks corporate growth, creating additional performance pressures that further divert the attention and thinking of executives towards the short term.
What’s needed is a deep rooted conviction among business unit heads and line managers that people really matter. That leaders must develop the capabilities of employees, nurture their careers and manage the performance of individuals and teams. HR professionals, meanwhile, need to improve their ability to translate business needs into talent strategies.
So the time has come for sales to wake up and smell the roses. There are already the beginnings of a push to bring standards, qualifications and accountability into sales through the establishment of the Marketing and Sales Standards Setting Body (MSSSB), an arm of The Department for Education and Skills, but this alone is not enough.
Herb Rubenstein says ‘sales people today are generally viewed by customers and potential customers as people who push products and services and who succeed, in the short run, by getting a person to buy whatever the sales person is selling. Sales people are considered as “loners,” not team players and people who set sales targets or sales goals first, and then use the customers as “objects” to meet their goals’.
He goes on to say ‘A newer image of the sales person is emerging. The new role of the sales person is presenter and educator. This new image of the sales person is grounded in the realization that the sales person is [now] a knowledge worker’.
It is this new recognition of sales people as knowledge workers that is driving change in the way selling is done and expected to be done at a rate never before imagined. The old truths of selling are no longer enough to drive success.
The art of selling to businesses is changing. It has had to. As recently as ten years ago a sales person only needed confidence and good people skills to be a major success within the sales industry. Perhaps this could have been due to the nature of the sales process back then. Price was still considered an issue when making the sales pitch. Customers ten years ago were not as savvy or perhaps as knowledgeable about their market place as they are now. So what has changed? Factors such as increases in global competition and ever increasing customer demands has seen today’s business environment evolve like never before.
The arrival of the internet phenomenon has given customers unparalleled access to information on their operating markets and suppliers. Margins are being squeezed across many sectors and maintaining consistent growth, as well as increasing shareholder value, is becoming tougher than ever before.
These factors have not only changed the face of business, but they have fundamentally changed the face of sales today. Ten years ago, having the confidence and excellent people skills may have been considered an art form, but today, being able to just talk the talk is not going to differentiate their business from the rest of the pack. The days of in office jokes and high-fives at the monthly sales meeting are long gone. For many organizations, the monthly sales meeting has gone down a path to nervousness, and is approaching depression!
How can this be avoided? Only by a distinct change in your sales team’s approach to selling. If your sales team is not differentiating your business from the rest of the pack and building competitive advantage for your customers, then something has to change. If it doesn’t, in today’s ultra-competitive market, depression will be the only emotion felt during the monthly sales meeting.
In recent research at the University of Warwick, Nigel Piercey highlighted that the biggest issue that has been driving the focus of business over the last twenty years had been an improvement in total quality management. He then goes on to state that incremental improvement today is very small in this area and says that the biggest advance that businesses can make over the next twenty years is by improving their differentiation and competitive position in the marketplace.
The way he believes this will be achieved is by improvements in account management functions and, through that, enhancing the customer’s perception of the unique value that an organization delivers. In today’s market, given the similarities and cross over between offerings, it is clear that the offering itself is no longer the core differentiator and differentiation now can only be created when the customer perceives one organization has a better understanding of the needs of its business than another. This needs to be the focus for business in the 21st Century.
But to achieve this requires top sales talent, which as has already been clearly shown is at a premium today, so what can be done.
21st Century selling is very different in nature to 20th Century selling. It requires different skills. Skills which were vital in the old ‘solution selling’ days are no longer relevant and there are many new skills, particularly relating to business acumen, knowledge capture and analytics which whilst previously not being seen as important, are critical today.
Hence, the map of what good looks like for sales professionals today is often very different from that currently in use in organizations This is the first element that needs to change. Once an organization can identify who has the potential to be good in 21st Century selling, then the skills gap can be clearly identified and appropriate action can be taken to fill these gaps. Without this knowledge – the gap between customer expectations and sales delivery capability will continue to grow. With this knowledge, maybe a start can be made on finally winning the war for top sales talent.
SA.com, a leading sales effectiveness company has joined forces with SHL world leaders in psychometric testing, to launch the Future Sales Effectiveness Talent Audit (SETA); an on-line tool beta testing right now and due for full market release in June 2008. This tool, a combination of SHL’s proven sales potential analysis, the Sales Report and SA.com’s Future Skills Analysis tool can truly identify future sales potential and clearly highlight those who can and those who can’t sell the 21st Century way, whilst also highlighting the skill gaps that need filling. This will enable organizations at last to make a real dent in the shortage of effective sales professionals capable of working the way customers want to buy in today’s ever more complex world. SA.com has also released a fixed price transformation program to support the move from solution selling to strategic selling, reducing risk and increasing success rates significantly.
Maybe at last the battle for future sales talent is on the turn.
