The Fourth Customer Revolution

I don’t want to worry you, but you’ll need a blank sheet of paper.

As a creative, Disruptive Selling was a lovely read for more reasons than the strength of its content. For one, it is beautifully designed, it reads like a little art project with beautiful graphics and typesetting.

But we’re not here to talk about design. We’re here for the content and the author, Maes, has a valid point. And to paraphrase; the driving difference between companies moving forward is going to be the customer experience.

Stop selling and start helping

Cause it really is all about the value a user gets from your brand which goes beyond just the product.

Customer Experience Is the New USP.

What is this customer experience? And who is responsible for it? Well the simple answer is everyone including your clients. Yup! Your clients are responsible for not only their experience with your brand but the experience of others. Clients travel solo on a large leg of their customer journey, forming their opinion of their need without the hand holding of a sales person.

It’s the company’s job to ensure that the (potential) clients have access to the kind of information that they would need to make a purchase (a word he said sounded too formal so from now on we’ll call it ‘agreement’). This falls on to the marketing department to provide content that help nurture and nudge clients down an online trail that has been covertly designed for this purpose.

Below is a sample of the customer's journey towards a purchase and repeat purchase. (It's best not to consider a sale completed until you get the customer to the advocacy stage).

Marketing Automation is the Now, the Future and the Forever.

How do you craft a beautifully customised journey? Well the answer is simple; invade their privacy track their behaviour with lead nurturing. Cookies register the prospects activity what they do and view online. You can then target an ad to redirect them to your website where they can get more information in the form of brochures, white papers and webinars on your virtual turf. Armed with this information, you may launch email and banner campaigns crafted to fit a maximum five predefined client personae (basically phrase your USP and content to suit the specific client’s needs).

Using lead scoring metrics, you can then qualify when it’s time for a human being to step in and complete the story.

Selling Ice to an Eskimo

I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell. I am a hustler baby, I'll sell water to a well

Sorry Jay-Z those days are long gone. Gone are the days of the wheeler dealers. Of the master salesmen who could sell ice in the winter and fire in hell. Nowadays, sales and marketing agents are focused on providing excellent value to the customers.

The New form of selling has three key components identified by Maes as; Accountable, Agile and Authenticty. The Triple-A experience.

Authenticity is about always being there for your customers (different from putting your customer at the centre of the organisation) focusing more on helping them than helping your bottom line. Agility refers to an often overlooked component of Digital Transformation I touched upon on in a previous article, agility refers to your organisations ability to respond to the changing technology and needs of the customer. Accountability is closely linked with Agility (you may also know it as rapid innovation); your staff should have the freedom to achieve their goals and respond quickly to incoming information but there must be some sort of goal that they are working towards, that allows you to measure the success of certain technologies or practices.

Disruptive selling is a self-reinforcing process. By collating and analyzing more information to provide targeted information to provide targeted information to your customers and your own commercial organisation, your company will systematically get better at what it does.

That sounds a lot like continuous improvement to me. I would suggest compressing the three components to just two; Authenticity and Continuous Improvement.

Conclusion

The theory put forward is very attractive and enthusing. Yes, this is how it should be done! Although, in practice it’s never that easy and the costs for starting up are incredibly high.

But the key take away from this book is this; although it calls itself disruptive selling. The book and the process is about far more than selling. It's about understanding what motivates your customers (over here @Reliance we use the PESTLE method), creating the right value proposition, setting up the right organisational structures and culture, It's about a rewriting of business processes to prioritise long term customer satisfaction over short time profit. It's about marketing automation and most importantly, it's about digital transformation.

Brilliant. Brava!

And that is the heart of disruptive selling. An all hands-on deck customer service experience that revolves around making your customer happy with the right product, right service, the right content and most importantly, at the right time. And it all starts with knowing your customer.

But as usual, if you have any questions on how to start disruptive selling, the issues you might face starting, alternatives to disruptive selling. I can address them