Are you achieving the full potential of your capital investment in technology solutions?

Are you the sales head of your company? Did you invest a whole lot of money recently in technology enablement of your field sales force? You thought that suave UI and dazzling functionality of the sales dashboard will send sales force productivity through the roof. But an entire financial year has passed, and you still don’t see the benefits of the technology upgrade bearing the fruits of success. Well, it might just be that you have solved only one piece of the 2-pieced puzzle here and completely forgot about the complementary part, the elusive human angle to any technology solution.

To understand this, let us go back and explore how a multi-layered channeled sales organization is formed in the first place. Imagine you are Elon Musk and just built 10 Model Ss. Now you need to sell them. What will you do? Call up that rich uncle who you know loves cars, looking to change his old worn out Mercedes and is always enthusiastic to experiment while purchasing. Effectively you are leveraging your knowledge of your uncle’s likes and dislikes to drive the sales. So, what do we establish here? We establish selling is an intensely personal activity (especially any high involvement high price product) and depends a lot on the connect the sales person is able to build with the customer at the final point of sales. Keep this point in mind.

You (or Elon) are able to sell all your 10 Model Ss to family and friends and are very excited about the prospects of your business. You want to scale up and start building more of those Model S cars. You have sold to all your friends and family and now have to branch out. Here is where you encounter first level constraint which I will call ‘human interaction capacity barrier’. Psychological studies indicate a human being can maintain only a finite number of meaningful personal connections at any given time. While this magic number varies person to person, studies indicate it tapers out somewhere around 150[1]. Now combine these two arguments- you need to establish deep personal connections in order to achieve sale and you can only establish a finite number of personal connections. This leads to only one logical conclusion- you need to introduce distributors (or field sales personnel) between you and the customer in order to scale. This is the basic tenet of forming a multi-layered sales channel. Now you can have multiple levels between you and final customer due to various efficiency reasons and sales funnel becomes more and more complicated. But the fundamental constraint remains the same. Give or take for every 150 customers, you need 1 sales personnel. If I take the apex angle of the sales funnel (refer to the figure) as the effectiveness measure for your sales organization, the upper bound of this angle is dictated by that fundamental constraint.

Now let us explore how we can leverage technology here. To do that, first, we have to think a little about how you build a personal connection. Refer to your definition of a good salesman. He would remember that your favorite color is blue from when you bought your last sherwani right? He would remember you were put off by the v-neck collar but adored the round-necked one, right? Now put yourself in the shoes of that good salesman. Can you comprehend the difficulty of remembering and internalizing this level of details for 150 strangers who you never knew before? Wouldn’t you just love someone telling you all this so that you need not rote in the first place? That is where salesforce assistant dashboard comes into the picture. This support system captures every little detail about the customer, identifies the key attributes required and displays in a readable form in the aforementioned dashboard. This should help you overcome ‘human interaction capacity barrier’ and enable each your sales personnel to effectively connect with more than 150 unique customers. That sounds easy enough, right? Then why did your sales leads and sales numbers remain stagnant despite implementing this technology solution, which the provider promised will deliver immediate measurable impact? Let us come back to the original question- what is the crucial second piece of the puzzle you are missing?

Well here goes my take on it. You have given a fancy dashboard to your salespeople who have been selling cars (just a figure of speech, can be anything) for last 10 years. But they are still habituated to internalizing every nook and cranny about their customers. They use the information from the dashboard to validate what they already know when they are talking to the customer. So actually, they are still bound by the ‘human interaction capacity barrier’ and can maintain relationships with at max 150 customers only. You need to train them what details they need to internalize about their customers (prospective or returning) and what information they can rely on the dashboard to give them. As they can manage each customer interaction effectively knowing a little bit less about each customer (dashboard bridges the gap in order to ensure the customer experience is not affected), theoretically each salesperson can now engage more than 150 unique customers. And this delta will translate into a widening of the apex angle of your sales funnel. You need to train your sales people to move into this new mental model and this is the critical second piece of the puzzle you are missing right now. So, the moral of the story is that don’t just buy a fancy technology solution without understanding what complementary changes you require in your people and processes to harvest the full potential of your investment.

[1] Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates". Journal of Human Evolution. 22 (6): 469–493. doi:10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J