Bringing [Sales] Leadership into the Digital Age

“Creating a workplace that attracts high-caliber digital workers requires a progressive and forward-looking organizational culture. The impetus to set this culture has to come from leadership. The traditional attributes that set a good leader apart remain relevant, but today’s leaders also need to be well-versed in digital and how it’s disrupting their business. CEOs such Jeff Immelt at GE, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Marc Benioff of Salesforce are moving away from hierarchical, autocratic top-down approaches and looking instead to create more open, collaborative environments, powered through digital collaboration tools.”

I took the above paragraph verbatim from an excellent hot-off-the-press report on digital transformation from the World Economic Forum, created in collaboration with Accenture. It embodies the forward-looking digital enterprise vision Mike Sutcliff, Group CEO, is spreading at Accenture Digital. For more on this, watch Mike’s fascinating interview with my colleague and friend, Michael Krigsman at CXOTalk.

If you are a sales leader, or if sales leaders report to you, I have a vitally important question for you:

How is digital disrupting sales?

Let’s recap… “today’s leaders need to be well-versed in digital and how it is disrupting their business”.

These days, I travel around the globe making the case that most leaders don’t understand how digital is disrupting sales.

To lift another quote from the same report…

“There’s never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education, because these people can use technology to create and capture value. However, there’s never been a worse time to be a worker with only ‘ordinary’ skills and abilities to offer, because computers, robots and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate.”

That’s from Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, which the report quoted from their book The Second Machine Age.

This was a central point made by Kevin Warren, Chief Commercial Officer at Xerox, in his keynote address at the Council for Independent Colleges Presidents Institute, which I attended with nearly 400 college presidents in January 2017 to explore "Education for America's Future" and transformational change in the digital age. Kevin's fundamental thesis is that technical proficiency is simply table stakes; to be successful one must also have intellectual agility and empathy, in addition to communication, interpersonal, teamwork, critical thinking, decision-making, and creative problem-solving skills.

Many leaders don’t understand that effective sales strategies require an emphasis more on selling through service and insights, rather than through pushy pushy, in-your-face closing skills.

By insights, I mean data that streams from your products and services and reveals how your customers are using them. Such data takes clueless questions such as “Is it time to replace your old equipment?” and transforms them into insightful, fact-based statements such as “Your current machine is 140% past it’s predicted reliable life and is running at only 64% efficiency”.

Remember the old notion of sales professionals as slick, friendly, persuasive types who probably lack a bit when it comes to substance and smarts? That stereotype is going to be banished by digital transformation. Today, sales - like everything else - is increasingly a data-informed process that requires both hard and soft skills.

Do leaders understand this? I’m talking about leaders at the highest levels, and the answer seems to be no. Here’s one more quote from the report:

“Relatively few companies make radical changes to their boards and leadership that may be needed. A study by Russell Reynolds found that of the 300 largest companies in the United States, Europe and Asia, 217 had no digital board members.”

If companies aren’t changing fast enough at the top - and if you’re not at the top yet, what to do?

You need to explore and understand the growing role that data, sensors, the Internet of Things, AI, automation, machine learning, and other technologies are having on sales. I don’t mean this in some woo-woo SciFi manner, but in a highly grounded sense that digital is transforming every industry and functional area. It’s replacing gut instincts with hard numbers. It’s connecting people and organizations into increasingly tight and fast-reacting relationships. Everything that used to be dumb and disconnected is now wired and intelligent. Isolationism has been replaced by ecosystem.

But, at its core, all business is about people. The people who “get” digital transformation will shape - and benefit from - opportunities. The people who don’t, well, I wouldn’t want to be one of them, and neither should you.

Jill Rowley wants to connect every person (and device) she encounters. You can engage with her on LinkedIn and Twitter if you need help digitally transforming your sales organization.