Sales Force in the 21st century
How Developing a 21st Century Sales Force Can Enhance Your Corporate ProfitAbility!
“So I am going to make you an offer you really can’t refuse. This is a special deal for you but I need you to sign up today because it is only valid for 24 hours.”
Thankfully the days of the sharp salesman with his crumpled suit and bag of tricks are largely a distant memory but there are still a significant number of companies whose Sales Force spend the whole time in customer meetings pushing the features of their products or services and trying to attach them to perceived benefits which will make the customer’s life carefree and serene. The irony is that most customers see through such approaches and tend to switch off until the sales pitch is over. As the salesman leaves the meeting empty handed and wondering what went wrong (“but our products are the best in the market”) there are Sales people from other companies hitting maximum sales targets and delivering great results for their company and doing no real product selling at all. What on earth is going on?
In a word, “technology”. The dramatic increase in access to information about anything from anywhere at any time since the internet hit the airwaves 15 years ago has changed the role of the Sales Force for ever. Customers can now get an almost limitless amount of information on products and services which interest them without having to endure a single sales pitch. This is clearly a major problem for a salesman whose only capability is to deliver sales pitches! Customers today neither want nor need to be sold to. Rather what they are looking for before even considering doing business with you is to understand how you can help create and add value to his business, how you can provide advice on relevant matters pertaining to him and how he can tap into your industry knowledge and contact network to further his own sphere of activity. Our own learning and development interventions with our clients reflect this change. We focus exclusively on “customer engagement”, developing great relationships, and on helping sales people to understand how value creation works for their business. Not a feature or benefit in sight!
The focus of the Sales role in the last few years has gradually shifted from an inward-looking product-oriented one to a customer-facing value-adding one and companies who fail to recognize this are basically on a slippery slope to lost sales and profit dips. The challenge most of them face is a simple one; their sales force is good at selling but have never been taught to create and add value or provide a broader spectrum of advice and suggestions to their customers. How should they improve the overall business acumen of the sales team so that it can perform these now obligatory functions? How do you move a Sales Manager into the role of Business Advisor?
The simple answer is to expose them to a series of training programmes covering a wide range of topics. Strategic planning, Finance for non-Finance managers, fundamentals of Marketing…the list is potentially a very long one. This can be both very time consuming (and costly) and programmes such as these tend to be heavy with theory. This is where we believe Corporate ProfitAbility can play a role. In spending 2 days running a fictitious but highly realistic company in a hands-on manner Sales people can be exposed to all of the disciplines listed above and more. Alongside the decision making on strategy, marketing spend and pricing delegates are taken through all of the critical financial ratios and tools and then practice using these to analyse the performance of their company. This learning can then be used to form the basis for understanding how they can build a much more rounded and valuable relationship with their key customers back in the real world.
