Every Business was a Booming Business. Until it wasn't.

And pretty easy something more bold and audacious and spiky can catch our customer’s eyes. It can happen every moment. And here is a collection of things I discussed, heard, read about recently and which made me listen and think. Most I do agree and some I know. Maybe some food for thought for you as well – or just enjoy the summary.

McKinsey surveyed, companies that excel at sales growth are tightly focused on developing the talent they need by understanding how sales reps really work. With as much as half of a company’s value creation resting with the sales force, sales-team effectiveness is crucial for growth. In fact, McKinseys’ research show that the sales experience is one of the top drivers in customers’ purchasing decisions. And while everybody can recognize, for instance, that the skills needed to sell software solutions can be very different from those needed to win in biotech, many organizations still rely on static training methods that have been in place for years and tend to focus on a universal set of seller capabilities. Results however are based on gut feelings.

Gallup surveyed that 82 % of B2B customers aren’t engaged anymore - a very high risk of taking business elsewhere. And it’s true for every type of enterprise, from heavy manufacturing to consultancies, and if we don’t change the way we work with our clients, we could lose most of our existing customer base, not because of products or prices or competition, just by failing our customers. So it’s no secret about Key Account Management how little most organizations actually know about the true benefits of servicing their major clients. But if you want to change the way of being, you have to change the way of doing. Effective sales work is not generic. And reliable data on the health of our customer relationships rarely find its way out of a spreadsheet or swarm your dashboards or drip out of a workshop. Ignoring the voice of our customer can be exponentially harmful. Same with ignoring the voice of our employees. Spending time in new experiences is much more profitable than buying new technologies. And it brings more joy. And the major reason why innovation is difficult and why even established companies fail is because we tend to look at the future wearing a lens colored with the past.

CSO Insights found out that 54% of forecasted deals are lost to competition or no decision made. These are lost opportunities and this is exactly where the blood will be spilled. And it’s not the fault of poor sales execution or a lack of qualified marketing leads, it’s the failure to understand what the modern buyer is thinking and doing as they research and evaluate their options. Before buyers ever pick the phone and call a rep, they’ve formed strong opinions, evaluated and eliminated vendors and made dozens of decisions about their purchase. Let’s face it, you wouldn’t be losing 54% of forecasted deals if prospective buyers found what they were looking for and got the answers to the questions they were asking. Buyers still follow their legacy buying processes which reward them, or at least don't punish them, for taking the safe road and only answering the obvious questions. However, the biggest benefits tend to be those which were not stated in the initial and formalized conversation, and these can only be uncovered while interacting with them early in the process. Delivering what’s best for buyers isn’t necessarily about letting them decide what’s best, they’re looking for sellers to show them the way. Do you need sales or what?

A 2012 global work force study of 32,000 employees by Towers Watson found that the traditional definition of engagement - the willingness of employees to voluntarily expend extra effort - is no longer sufficient to fuel the highest levels of performance. Willing, it turns out, does not guarantee able. Now put this in another perspective, the way people feel at work profoundly influences how they perform. This is true for our existing employee’s base, and even more for the new talents everybody is fighting for. Track Record, Business Experience & other needs and benefits miss the real issue. And even our customers don’t care anymore about what companies do and how they try to sell. They are looking for instant gratification - and sometimes they are just curious about someone and want to benefit from his experience.

You don’t have to work in a business to be curious about it and you don’t have to have a career in a specific business to understand it. Thinking does not cost a lot. However NOT thinking is very expensive, especially in sales. I do agree that most sellers go through the common motions. They attend whatsoever high-quality training, come back home and still fill out the RfPs and ROIs, conduct their online and other forms, their forecast- and fiscal-reports, they e-mail, and they call. But it’s just not enough and it is a lot without understanding of today’s customer. So do you think your sellers just have a closing problem? Think again.

I do agree that most Managers want everything tied to performance, because that’s a tangible metric they can use for comparison and because training action looks good to their bosses and to shareholders. There is less interest in the social psychology behind a sales process than in how to squeeze a few more dollars out of a product and some good reason why most if not all managers and sellers focus solely on qualification and not on disqualification. The result is a significant gap between where executives think sales engagement is, and where it is in reality. We do see it in the hockey sticks every quarters’ end. We see it in the 54 % loss of forecasted deals. If we want to change the way of being, we have to change the way of doing. Effective sales work is not generic. Instead of forcing your sales people to attend high-sophisticated trainings watching an expert explain a new method, let them figure out what really drives their customers’ expectations and motives today and what they need to set and get demand side economies of scale.

I do agree that managers and leaders are very different kinds of people. Managers are competent, they focus on progress, and they do everything to make their trains run on schedule. Leaders are imaginative, they focus on substance, and they first decide where their trains are going to. Managers are people who probably do things right. Leaders are people who do the right thing.

Today most of the sellers who get to the end of a sales cycle, seem to be in a hurry – maybe because their managers or their methods and tools push them. In extreme, deals can be lost easily to NOT thinking and inattentiveness. And whatsoever the sales methodology we have, sales is so much more than that, so much more than high-quality training, track record, and the ability to manage graduate-level CRM or other sales-tools’ execution issues. It’s the ability to think outside the box, to think abstractly, to think about solving a problem we have never seen or heard of before, about a problem which is even not ours, and still be able and willing to develop an idea how to step through in a thoughtful, engaged and original way. Just then it becomes a matter of standing out, and means a really valuable approach and a good chance to go beyond the information already accessible in our collaterals, on our homepage or other touchpoints. I am again and again surprised how few people do that.

It was Douglas McGregor from the MIT who distinguished two types of managers according to the way they are treating employees. Type 1 thinks that employees are lazy by nature und try to avoid labor whenever and wherever it is possible (Theory X). Type 2 thinks that employees are, by nature, ambitious and motivated to take over responsibility (Theory Y). But it was not this distinction which made him famous. It was his insight that it is not about the decision if "Theory X" or "Theory Y" is true and that both theories are right at the same time. 50 years later Frederic Laloux resamples this piece of thought and updates what we know is true for a lot of organizations: “if you view people with mistrust (Theory X) and subject them to all sorts of controls, rules, and punishments, they will try to game the system. Meet people with practices based on trust, and they will return your trust with responsible behavior. At the core, this comes down to the fundamental spiritual truth that we reap what we saw: fear breads fear and trust breads trust”. The consequences for classical (micro-) management approaches are shattering. Because the control and reporting system produces exactly the circumstances to which it considers itself to be the response.

The way we’re working isn’t working. Tony Schwartz once said: “even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until you fall asleep”.

Here's the thing: digital sucks. But it's not digital's fault. Digital is just a tool. And so, digital is what we - the people - make of it. And that means that we can - if we want - make a course correction. With every choice we make online, with every service we choose to use - and, more fundamentally, with the products we choose to build and the relationship we choose to have with our customers, we can shape the future of digital. The future is not set. Digital disruption is not done. The digital genie is not going back in the lap. So, should we all disconnect and head back to the woods? Well, that might be harder than you think anyway. But isn’t it interesting that many digital pioneers have recently discovered the value of disconnecting or slowing down. It's still day one. Digital sucks. We can make it better.

Have you ever asked senior managers a simple question: “If your employees feel more energized, valued, focused and purposeful, do they perform better?” Not surprisingly, I guess the answer is almost always “Yes.” And have you ever asked the next question: “So how much do you invest in meeting those needs?” An uncomfortable silence typically ensues. How to explain this odd disconnect? The most obvious answer is that systematically investing in employees, beyond paying them a salary, didn’t seem necessary until recently. So long as employees were able to meet work demands, employers were under no pressure to address their more complex needs. Increasingly, however, employers are recognizing that the relentless stress of increased demand — caused in large part by digital technology — simply must be addressed. So the simplest way for companies to take on this challenge is to begin with a basic question: “What would make our employees feel more energized, better taken care of, more focused and more inspired?” It costs nothing, probably breads some trust, and you will get some interesting answers.

“Invest in a business a fool can run because someday, a fool will.” It’s not the nicest one from Warren Buffett. However, the CEO of a company sets the tone, drives the culture, and guides the strategy of a business. Having a fool at the helm can often steer the company in the wrong direction. And if the direction is wrong it doesn’t make sense to push your oarsmen like galley slaves to row faster and harder. You need to change course. Nevertheless, I do think that Buffett was referring more to the importance of a strong business model rather than discounting management entirely. After all, many of his own acquisitions occurred with the caveat that current management remain in place. When beginning to research a business for the first time, you should start by analyzing the strength of its management team. Poring over financial statements is one way to judge companies. However, many aspects of their managers jobs are intangible and therefore be difficult to judge. So how does an investor evaluate a strong CEO and executive team? Most start by looking at three factors - experience, employee satisfaction, and whether executives and shareholders are tied at the hip in terms of compensation. Not an exhaustive list, isn’t it?

And finally, many of these challenges call for a new set of sales skills, training, and tools. Companies are having trouble filling that void, however, because many of them lack the means to identify and cultivate the skills they need. And yet, I do not know of a man who became a top seller as a result of having undergone a body language course or a solution sales training. Sales are made by people to people. Technology and tools can help to keep the process on track, but even the coolest app is no match for the ability to hold a dialogue and clearly articulate value, eye to eye.

The problem is that most salespeople don’t have the skills or the confidence – it’s mostly the confidence - to initiate compelling conversations with customers. This is where I can help you to get the best out of your tools that enable your sales people to succeed. If there was only one golden rule of seller, career and organization advancement at the same time, this would be it: Get Close to Customers!

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