Focusing on Personal Relationships Will Damage Sales, Handicap Growth

Salespeople and sales managers talk about personal relationships as if they are an asset.

Now we could argue that it’s commercial relationships, not personal ones, where the value resides. And that could lead to a debate about whether the latter causes the former or vice versa.

That debate, however interesting, is a distraction from a more significant problem that occurs when organizations assign too much value to personal relationships. The problem is that the organization tends to adopt a customer-centric, rather than a campaign-centric, approach to sales.

Being customer-centric can be good or bad depending on how that concept is defined. A focus on cohorts of similar customers is good. However, a focus on individual customers can be dangerous.

How a Customer-centric Approach Can Go Wrong

Here’s an example of how things can go wrong.

A salesperson pages through a list of customers. It’s not a huge list because there’s a natural limit to the number of customer relationships that a salesperson can maintain simultaneously.

The question the salesperson is asking, as they review each customer, is: what can I propose to this organization?

Now, if the salesperson has a library of compelling propositions to choose from, they can simply select the most relevant proposition for that customer and start the conversation. However, if they don’t, they must then attempt to invent a compelling proposition for that customer on the fly.

There are two reasons why it’s unlikely that this salesperson will invent a compelling proposition. The first is that they don’t have the necessary resources — or the authority — to do so. The second is that they are unlikely to invent a proposition that lessens their importance in the customer relationship. And those propositions that are more focused on campaign results than on relationships tend to be the most compelling ones!

But our salesperson is fine if they have a library of compelling propositions to select from, right? It’s here that a reality check is required. It turns out that most organizations do have a library of propositions but few — if any — are compelling.

The reason is that the organization as a whole has adopted the salesperson’s perspective — the primacy of personal relationships. But the reality is that growth proceeds from compelling propositions, not personal relationships.

And truly compelling propositions are those that are unlikely to be conceived — let alone approved — without the involvement of the executive team. More controversially, truly compelling propositions are likely to reduce salespeople’s involvement with accounts.

3 Requirements for Compelling Sales Propositions

An example of a truly compelling proposition is Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI). Industrial supply has been transformed by VMI. But VMI is not an idea that could ever have emerged from a sales or even a marketing department. And VMI, in practice, tends to dramatically reduce the role of traditional salespeople.

There are three practical requirements for truly compelling propositions.

First, the active involvement of senior executives from multiple departments is required for both the conceptualization and the approval of what will necessarily be radical ideas.

Second, the organization as a whole will need to mobilize to breathe life into these ideas. If a great idea doesn’t meet resistance from finance, IT, logistics, and production, it’s probably not a great idea.

Third, these propositions need to be sold to batches — or cohorts — of customers. This means that the sales and marketing departments need to mount a dedicated campaign to approach every target customer within the cohort for which the proposition is relevant.

This third requirement is the most important. Without it, the organization will lack both the quality and speed of market feedback that’s required for ongoing improvement. And without ongoing improvement, the organization will struggle to develop truly compelling propositions. Innovation, it turns out, is not a one-off event.

Customer-centric vs. Campaign-centric: The Choice Is Yours

The bottom line is that salespeople have two possible modes of operation:

The customer-centric one, where they start with a customer list and ask, for each, what will be a compelling proposition?

Or, the campaign-centric one, where they start with a compelling proposition and doggedly pitch this proposition to every decision maker within the cohort of organizations for which this proposition was designed.

These two modes of operation are mutually exclusive. So, choose carefully!