Smarter Selling

Making transition into effective selling

Conventional selling scripts, micro-management, passive strategy discussions, traditional meeting room sales techniques, booth camps and command-control leadership are proved to be ineffective to bring the productivity, energy and motivation to the salesforce. A quick fix of replacing the sellers, hiring premium sales consultants, pumping abundance of short-term training and keeping the sales reps in close leash might bring some immediate improvements, but it will not solve the root-cause of the problem and could be an expensive and a risky proposition for the organization's longevity. Maybe it’s the right time to sit back, analyze the current situation, revisit the company’s vision for the future and adopt new sales strategy - smarter selling for long-term success and growth.

Adopting smarter selling model will affect four roles in the organization including field sales reps, first-line managers, marketing specialists, and sales engineers.

Transitioning field sellers into industry solution sellers role

First step to smarter selling is moving away from the concept of brand/product selling. Currently many organizations has defined the role of outside sales rep or brand manager or coverage rep, whose responsibility is to sell a portfolio of products in a given territory. For companies under 400 employees and selling a small set of niche products, this sales model may not create a big problem. But on the long run when companies grow, extend their offerings and penetrate into new industries and territories, the effectiveness of selling begin to erode due to fact that the salesforce is more focused on prescriptive selling than creative selling and it’s less inclined with customer’s needs.

Multi-national organizations have multiple brands. They try to create a bridge between cross-brand sellers to supersize the deal but it’s seldom a success. For better coverage, organizations appoint senior client reps to strategic accounts, but their job responsibility or contribution doesn’t go beyond managing daily relationship. Their industry knowledge doesn’t go deep enough.

So what is happening is, you have all brand reps making several sales calls to explore opportunities with sole motivation to sell a portfolio of tools, with limited or no insight into what customer's needs are, along with all the client reps managing the daily relationship with customer with limited or no insight into what problems the company's products can solve. You lose time, you lose money and you lose momentum. The cost of sales goes up as the deals are closed in longer timeframe and do not scale up. On the other-hand, customers prefer to align themselves with value-add sellers whom they can have intelligent, industry-specific conversation, exchange ideas and work with subject-matter experts who can help them define the next improvement area in their job and committed to their success.

Building strong relationship is an important part of seller's job, but customers are more inclined to dedicate their time to the individuals that can bring immediate value and knowledge to them. They expect sellers to know more about their company and industry and demonstrate their expertise and knowledge right away. Building up a salesforce with core industry skills will lead to sustainable growth and success, and ultimately lead to increased market share and higher profitability.

Transitioning first-line managers to sales leaders

Innovation is never possible without motivation. At the center of every change and transition, we have people whose influence is much greater than the combination of any other components. It’s rather impossible to make any progress without getting people’s buy-in and let them drive the execution.

The second step to smarter selling is to move first-line managers into a more active, contributor role as sales leaders. With that approach, the responsibilities of the first-line managers will be redefined, or the role of middle-management will disappear.

What is the characteristic of a leader? Let’s start with the first one; respect. In personal life respect drives from seniority, relationship, rank, knowledge, etc. In professional life, the respect is mostly connected to experience.

In smarter selling model, the first-line manager’s responsibility and contribution to the sales process is not limited to couching the field sales team at micro-management level and consolidating data for reporting to upper management. If you are lining up your senior people with sole purpose to give directions, to patrol sales force, indeed you are not running a sales organization. You need senior people to run the operational part. But if you’re not appointing individuals with the right mind-set at the front-line to drive business, innovation, and growth, then you’re putting your business line’s success at jeopardy. If your front-line managers lack specific industry knowledge but mostly possess operation experience, then the link between sales reps and their managers will be weak. A chain is only strong as its weakest link.

The second secret ingredient of a true leader is his/her continuous contribution to the team. You do not find many successful leaders sitting idle in their office and speculating ideas or brainstorming strategies. Check the history and revisit the recognized sales leaders and how they function. Successful sales leaders are actively on the road, spending their time with clients and end-users. They work closely with the field sellers and contribute on the go. The traditional model of spending lengthy discussions on weekly reviews, and sending out threats emails is proven to be not working. Most organizations are aware of the dilemma, though their workaround of replacing individuals or deploying more units do not solve the problem.

Sales leaders will eliminate the seven deadly sins of first-line managers;

• Sitting in their cubicle and managing remotely
• Sending out bulk emails
• Passive versus proactive management
• Qualifying versus contributing behavior
• Preaching versus advocating
• Scholastic versus practical knowledge
• Intuition versus experience

In smarter selling model, first-line managers will be replaced by sales leaders. The new sales process will eliminate the function of mid-management and many redundant practices attached with their job description. The sales organization, top to bottom, will be more lean, connected and results-oriented, and will consist of individuals who have value-adder profile than controllers.

The old-school qualifier behavior of the first-lime managers will be replaced by contributor role in which in their new role as sales leaders, they will be asked to demonstrate solid knowledge and effective insight into the closing of the deals. At present, many managers wear the hat of a reviewer, with limited contribution and effectiveness to move the sales to the next stage. Sales leader will play a more proactive role in the sales cycle and get involved in the sales process earlier and at the front-line. Instead of passively shadowing the opportunity pipeline, sales leader will shadow the sales skills and competence of their team while doing joint sales calls with them. They will be more close to the field and the problem domain. 

Adopting smarter selling model, organizations will also eliminate some processes and the dependency on reports. Getting reports is crucial in making decisions and understanding the trends. But the quality of the sales reports depends highly on the quality of the communication between first-line managers and sales reps, which majority of the time turns out to be a wishful projection and numbers game to save the day rather than unbiased and real projection of the opportunity space. By opening up the communication channel between sales reps and their managers in two directions, you’ll end up getting a more qualified forecast.

Transitioning sales engineers into solution architect role

Sales is a team sport. Success in sales is never secured, if sales reps do not engage technical sales engineers into the sales cycle and run the opportunity with them from the very beginning. Understanding each one’s roles and responsibilities and the open collaboration between the two roles, is essential in closing larger deals and building a strong pipeline. It’s like a marriage built on respect, trust and mutual interest to work together. As being an important player of the sales process, sales engineers cannot be positioned as technical resources responsible only for solution demonstrations, and product training. Sales engineers have to go one level up in their capability and get more accountability and responsibility. This is the third step to smarter selling; to transition sales engineers into solution architect role.

Customers are looking for more comprehensive turn-key solutions including technology, best practices and enablement. Sales engineers, only equipped with basic skills and product knowledge will fall short in satisfying the expectations and proposing a solution compelling enough to convince the customer.

Customers are looking for specialists not generalists. They are looking for experts not only doing installation but also managing the integration, migration efforts and certification/governance needs. Customer need help to support their long-term strategies and align their vision with market demands. They require resources who possess in-depth industry knowledge, who can architect a solution and who can help them manage the program successfully from inception to deployment.

In order to establish such results, sales organizations should invest in a very rigorous enablement path for their technical sellers and provide them the required expertise and comfort level to go one level up in their capabilities.

Transitioning marketing specialists to proactive sellers

The success of the sales execution depends a great deal on the health of the lead generation process. The more leads generated, more opportunities qualified, the pipeline get stronger so as the likelihood of achieving the sales targets. There is no discussion on the importance of the leads, though how to get good quality leads is always a state of the art.

The problem of accessing new leads can be solved in many ways. There are organizations that you can buy a list of contacts. This is a one-time shot and it might be a good starting point for companies entering new territories but it’s not a sustainable model due to cost, and as well it’s a blind shot and you never know whether the list would be any help. Bottom-line nobody can know your business better than you and it’s your responsibility to create leads.

The other way of getting quality leads is to hire sales people who bring their list of contacts. It’s a quick fix and the most common method that sales managers prefer to take. The challenge with that approach is no different than the previous one – it's a blind shot. Plus you will come to the end of the list very soon. You still need to come up with a sustainable method of creating new leads. With that approach, you might delay the problem for couple of quarters if you're lucky but continue to suffer with the same pain in the long-run.

Another approach is partnering with business partners and utilizing their network to penetrate into new accounts, new territories. This will work perfectly if the synergy and collaboration can be established at the right level. There has to be some time commitment and investment from both parties to make this model work successfully for both parties. If it’s well-planned and executed, it will succeed. One caveat with that approach is, you cannot prevent the same model to be implemented by your competitors. It’s difficult to have exclusivity in this model.

The better approach is to adopt proactive marketing. First aspect of proactive marketing is doing small, targeted events. Marketing has always a tendency to do big-bang events. Indeed for many organizations with international presence, doing those events is a standard way of doing business. But on the other token, if we measure the outcome of those campaigns, we'll quickly realize that the success ratio is not as high. Marketing team should put more focus on doing targeted, customer specific events rather than big-bang events. But how can the marketing team effectively do it, if they live outside the sales process, do not follow the industry trends closely and have limited insight into the customer needs? 

Second aspect of proactive marketing is enabling marketing team to be part of the sales process and engage them with prospecting activities and follow-ups. Presently some companies outsource this effort or use internal personnel for this purpose, but the success ratio is significantly low. Marketing specialists are in general not comfortable with the customer domain, they do not have much insight into particular accounts and they cannot articulate the value statement. Indeed their primary job is not selling.

As we are transitioning into industry selling model and moving away from brand-focused selling to specialist-selling, we’ll quickly realize the need of a specialist whose job is to create new campaigns and scan new prospects to drive good quality leads. For that purpose, you need to build a pool of individuals who adore chasing new prospects. They are trained on industry solutions, have prospecting scripts in-hand and they know exactly whom to reach, what questions to ask and how to avoid objections.

The strategy behind smarter selling is the active involvement and valuable contribution of every team member to the sales process. This applied to marketing specialists as well. Give them responsibility, educate them on the solution offering and industry trends, and expect them to close the deals.

Conclusion

In summary, we enter a new era where the basic rules of traditional selling are questioned and the responsibilities of sales team are redefined. Companies will adopt new sales paradigms like smarter selling in order to become more effective and profitable.

With smarter selling strategy, organizations will be able to run their organization with less hierarchy but more transparency. Every role will be more qualified and more connected with the rest of the team. Time spent with internal routine discussions will be replaced by outbound activities, yielding productivity and bringing motivation. The sales cycles will get shorter and the forecast will be more reliable.

Remember this is a mind-shift, a new paradigm. Changes will not happen overnight. Be prepared for opposition and push-backs. In order to succeed in implementing smarter selling model, there are certain steps that organizations need to undertake;

-        First, replace all the complainers and objection raisers in your organization. You need doers than whiners in your team.

-        Replace all individuals that have low-energy and lack of excitement. Passion and enthusiasm assure success.

-        Align your organization from top to bottom with contributors. You do not need middle-man.

-        Promote individual contribution. Create a virtual forum where every employee can nominate the next greatest idea or discuss any concern openly with the executive board. Create a transparent organization.

-        Build a team of evangelists.

-        Continuously promote optimism.