Sales Pressure Means Something is Broken

I learned a great deal about marketing and sales while studying Apple Inc. Nothing brings in the money but marketing and sales. You could say marketing rings the bell and sales share the food. They work together in a complementary way.

I have had people come into my inbox trying to sell something to me without first getting to know whether I fit their type of customer. They ram down my throat what they are selling just because they believe in the law of averages: the more people they reach with their offering, the more the likelihood of making a sell.

Marketing and sales are both an art and a science. They are art because they are skills and science because they follow a certain methodology that works. No one will ever succeed in business without mastering both the art and science of marketing and sales.

There was a time when marketing and sales were based on what the business owner but that has changed. It was the age when everything about business was the owner or CEO-centric. It was all about what the CEO wanted. Product development, marketing campaign, and sales were all styled to serve the company. The company knew exactly what everyone needs. That was the era of build and they will buy.

Then we had the time when everything was about the customer. The customer was king. The customer influenced product development. And that was good. However, marketing and sales were slow to catch up. Apple Inc was bold enough to make the transition with their sales and marketing.

Design thinking is changing everything and transforming the way business is operating. Employees, customers, investors, and owners are no longer seen with different lenses. They are all human. We are at a point where everything is becoming human-centric. Almost every company uses design thinking to develop its product and follows in the step of Apple Inc to use it in its culture, marketing and sales.

Companies that put pressure on their salespeople to meet sales targets lack a customer acquisition system that has been proven and that is human-centric. When salespeople are pressured, they transfer that pressure to their customers. They become both aggressive and manipulative in order to make sales. They even go to the extent of violating the dignity of their prospect just to make sales.

Pressure on salespeople in most cases is a sign that the marketing is broken. The customer acquisition system is faulty or outdated and needs to be fixed. If marketing is done well, there won’t have been a need to put pressure on salespeople. When enough sales are not coming in, the problem isn’t the salespeople but the marketing.

A business is a system and each part of the system functions to aid the other part of the system. When something is out of place, you need to do a system analysis. Take each system apart and find out what part is faulty. With a system that works, it’s hard for humans not to get results. That is why a system enables ordinary people to produce extraordinary results.

When you study very well, you will find out that most companies that put crazy sales targets for their salespeople hardly invest in marketing. And even if they do, their value proposition, culture, customer acquisition system, and customer service are not human-centric. Take Glomobile for instance, it has a great advertisement that brings people in but then its customer service pushes people out. No matter how much pressure their salespeople apply, they can’t meet the goal because something is broken that needs fixing.

When a salesperson goes out to convert prospects, she must be supported by every other system in the organization. The support makes it possible to achieve the goal no matter how crazy. Here are the support every salesperson needs:

1. A Customer Value Proposition that works

2. A Culture that brings out the best in the salesperson

3. Marketing that inspires and educate prospects and make them pre-interested and pre-qualified

4. A Customer Service that is empowered to exceed the expectations of the customer and continually improve as it learns more about the customer

When a salesperson is pressured, she will seem needy to the prospect. That gets interpreted as flight. When we become needy, we become narrow-minded with a scarcity mentality. It’s hard to make a sale with such a mindset.

When you are focused on the transaction, you think about making a sale; a killing. However, when you are focused on transformation, you think about people buying. Thinking of making the sales is disempowering to the prospect. It’s a focus on what the salesperson wants. But, thinking of buying is empowering to the prospect. You are focused on what the prospect wants.

Do you want to bring design thinking into your marketing and sales process? It will transform how you market and sell. Let’s start the conversation to bring the human-centered process into your business.

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1. Attain offering-need fit

2. Validate your Value Proposition

3. Prove Your Business Model

4. Develop your Customer Acquisition System

5. Introduction to Culture Design

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