Why are you paying for two sales people to deliver the results you should be getting from one?
With recent evidence from IDC showing that on average today between 1.5 -2.2 sales people are employed to deliver the same results that could be achieved with one fully effective sales person, is there any wonder that CEO’s are looking at Sales with ever increasing interest.
So what’s gone wrong?
If you type ‘selling’ into Google today you get 470 million responses, each one purporting that they have the magic elixir that will make you more money. Make what you will of this, but to me it says that the very term selling has become a problem today – what does it mean, what is involved in selling, which approach is the ‘right one’.
Is there any wonder with so many different views that sales people get confused about their role. Indeed the very mystique surrounding selling is often its downfall.
Selling is and always has been a very logical, structured profession which has become clouded and confused over time by the superfluity of ‘so called’ sales approaches, systems, methodologies and techniques. Sales Effectiveness is a way of cutting through this hyperbole and dragging the sales profession back to the raw, undeniable truth that is selling.
Selling, put simply, is presenting your offering to a prospective customer in such a way that they can see how you can help them solve a current business problem in such a way that it drives sustainable business success for the client and the client’s organization.
Sitting underneath the practice of selling are all of the technical and functional elements that together deliver your promise. This supporting activity has been confused in the recent past with selling. Wrong, this is simply putting together the jigsaw of tangible deliverables that support and underpin the act of selling. Selling itself is a trust based activity. Buyer and seller, through a relationship of mutual respect and trust, develop competitive advantage, differentiation, Brand improvement; Revenue and EBIT improvement for the buyers business, with the seller acting in the role of researcher and innovator. This is when selling really starts to become effective.
So why has the ‘selling’ community got so confused?
Because to achieve the simple act of effective selling requires a complex support infrastructure geared up to focus all the seller’s resources onto each customer individually. Many organizations today still have structures based on selling as it was in the 80’s and 90’s. These structures drive disconnects between sales and marketing leading to a dilution of value for buyers. Indeed when IDC asked “On a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is least effective and 100 is most effective, indicate how effective marketing is at optimizing sales’ efficiency and effectiveness in 2006?”, Marketing award themselves 66.1 (a C-) and Sales awarded Marketing 57 (a D+).
Why did this happen? It started in the industrial revolution, when the old personal and local contacts between buyer and seller, where the seller knew the buyer and understood their needs broke down in the name of efficiency and mass production. During this era, which lasted until the advent of the internet, sellers ‘got away with’ fobbing off ‘the consumer’ with impersonal, one size fits all offerings, caring little about the value each offering created for the buyer and spending more time counting the ever growing piles of cash within their organization.
The result of this is the cause of today’s challenges for sellers. Internally focused, many of today’s sellers struggle to understand why buyers no longer want what they offer; why buyers are always squeezing their prices and making them work harder for every penny. The result for sales organization.’s today is increasing cost of sale, reducing EBIT, pressure from every side on every department to drive out every possible cost. Yet this approach alone is the path to failure.
Having driven out every cost, maximized every efficiency, just when Western organizations thought they were wresting back control from the buyers, along came a double whammy of Global scale that has thrown a big spanner in the works of many organizations: The Internet and The East.
The internet opened up the eyes of buyers worldwide to what was available form anyone anywhere enabling them to shop around for the cheapest of whatever they wanted, or to search out that unique item that really added value to their lifestyle or business. Compare the meteoric rise of specialist one-man bands such as real ‘fish smoking’, rather than the injected flavor and artificially dyed color of ‘smoked fish’ offered by the mass producers.
The second phenomenon is the ever growing economies of the East. Following the ‘fall’ of communism and the opening of boundaries, the previously oppressed countries of ‘The East’ (Far East, Middle East and Eastern Europe) have saturated the world market with low cost goods and low cost migrants now roam the world in a population redistribution of Biblical proportion.
The old systems of selling can no longer cope with these dramatic and swift changes in world dynamics.
The old adage of ‘the customer knows best what they want’ is no longer always the case. Buyers are often just as confused as everyone else about what they need to increase their success. Now is the time for ‘selling’ to once again become a profession, where the buyer and seller work together in a relationship of mutual trust to deliver innovation and business success for each other.
Selling approaches from the 80’s and 90’s cannot deal with this level of complexity – or should it be with this level of simplicity!
What do you need to do to become ‘Sales Effective’?
Selling is once again going back to its roots. Understand your customer’s business problems better than they do; focus the resources at your disposal on the creation of business and personal innovation for your customers; ensure they understand ‘what’s in it for them’ or how your innovation will help them rise above the masses; and deliver what you promise, or more.
