Where do you work? What world? B2C? B2B? Big company? Small Company? What is your role?
Lets discuss the top 5 things that you want to take from this session… Examples… An action plan, some tips or tricks, some ideas for an approach….
1. Sales is a numbers game… The more phone calls you make the more meetings you will have. The more meetings you have the more proposals you will hand out. The more proposals you hand out the more sales you will make. 2. Sales Leadership tells salespeople what to do and asks them for the “numbers” above. They also ask for the ever popular “forecast”. It is almost never accurate… 3. Revenue is almost always the ONLY metric for an individual contributor or a sales organization. 4. Commission is almost always the top compensation model for members of the seller organization. 5. Sales people go out and sell. Marketing makes brochures, websites, white papers, etc... These functions are often in Silos. 6. Sales is often not integrated or aligned with any internal function. 7. “Sales is full of Cowboys!” – Quote from anyone in HR, Accounting, Delivery, etc… 8. Find anybody that looks and smells like a “customer” and try to sell them your stuff.
1. Marketing makes brochures, does survey’s, creates market research, creates websites, writes white papers, sends direct mail, creates tradeshow exhibits, etc. 2. This is often done with little collaboration with sales or using any customer feedback or customer insight. 3. Sales calls on the client. Often delivers a message that is inconsistent with Marketing. But has to adapt and respond to move the sales process forward. 4. These two groups are rarely on the same page, are not managed by the same metrics but claim to have the same super-ordinate goal of selling more stuff and generating more revenue and new clients.
The Decision Maker fields literally hundreds of “cold contacts” monthly. (Phone, e-mail, etc…) 1. The Decision Maker has less time and more responsibility than ever before. 2. The traditional buyer is often reactionary. They only engage in the buyer-seller process when they need something. 3. The buyer only buys from someone they TRUST. 4. Most often the buyer asks someone they trust for a referral to buy what they need. 5. Buyers often buy for personal reasons first, organizational reasons second. 6. Buyer organizations make it hard to do business with a new vendor. This limits the buyer’s options. 7. The Supply management organization wants to leverage Procurement “Best Practices” on indirect spend categories. i.e. Professional Services, IT Equipment, Corporate Travel, etc… 8. Buyers have just as many “buying systems” as salespeople have “selling systems”
1. Adversarial? Always selling… and not being sold… 2. Participants in the process make assumptions based on perception, past experience and the “reputation” of a sales transaction. 3. The interaction has become complacent. Not evolving as fast as it should be based on the advances in technology, information, knowledge, skills of the participants, etc… 4. Sellers continue to focus on themselves. What they can do and what the features and benefits are of their products and services. 5. The buyer often has this in the back of their mind: “You are trying to sell me something… I am NOT going to be sold”. 6. Buyer organizations continue to focus on price instead of value .
"The creation of substantial new value for customers and the firm by creatively changing one or more dimensions (aspects) of the business system“ (Sawhney, Wolcott and Arroniz, 2006)