Change and complexity are creating a variety of productivity problems in today’s sales team.
Buyer expectations are higher across almost every industry segment. For example, consumers want more choices, and they want faster service and better-trained associates to speak with. In another example, business buyers demand more complex solutions and services that more easily align to solve increasingly complicated business problems in new and innovative ways.
In response to these elevated buyer expectations, businesses across every industry are focusing their strategy, driving operational excellence, and improving their solution and product portfolios to stay ahead of the competition and add greater value to customers. To sales leaders, this should not be considered business as usual. These aren’t small incremental shifts that boards and CEOs are making. Quite the contrary — these are often tectonic shifts, driven by customer demands and expectations that require new ways of thinking and a renewed focus on helping buyers be more successful.
Your Company Doesn’t Get to Define Value Anymore
In response to the evolution of buyers, business executives from the CEO down to business unit leadership teams are working harder and smarter in the hopes of delivering more sophisticated products and services to customers. The challenge they face is daunting. In the span of less than 10 years, the balance of power has shifted. Not too long ago, your company was able to market and sell products and services to customers who didn’t have a lot of information at their fingertips and who didn’t need to involve a variety of different perspectives to solve their problems. In short, your company had the luxury of defining value for your customers. In today’s world, it’s quite the opposite.
Thanks to the Internet, customers are doing more homework and can make more informed decisions than ever before. Additionally, business customers are thinking about their roles in more cross-functional ways often requiring a variety of different perspectives and stakeholders need to be included in internal decision-making processes. More sophisticated consumers and more buying committees are key catalysts to buyers demanding more from their product and service providers. In short, they get to define what is valuable, not you.
Buyers Are Demanding That Companies Work in New Ways
In today’s dynamic work environment, business executives are faced with responding to these new buyer expectations. It’s not easy to react (and harder still to get in front of) sophisticated buyers who demand more value from their vendors and partners at every single touch point. At a macro level, economic forces are still at play forcing many companies to continue to invest in their supply chain, re-think how they bring products and services to market, or even redefine their business models – so your clients are changing too. This means your company must be a lot more precise in the value they bring to the table.
At a micro-level, your company probably isn’t organized the way your customers buy. If you think about it, it’s probably not organized to make it easy for customers to get what they need; especially when what they need crosses your functional silos. For example, customer service agents need to move more quickly to resolve customer issues – and that means technology, operations, marketing, service, and sales functions need to help them do it. Additionally, salespeople need to be able to bring together products, services, and education in insightful ways for customers – and that means product, marketing, sales, and training groups must be aligned to support actual conversations with customers.
What’s the payoff? Simply put, doing the heavy lifting to figure out how to work differently in ways that benefit customers can be lucrative. One only must think through how Apple’s focus on creating value for customers led to a solution-set that people didn’t even know they wanted (such as the IPhone). This created organic growth and a renewed focus on product innovations coupled with a relentless drive to pursue a customer-centric design discipline. New ways of working internally can clearly lead to more value for customers externally – and that means more profitable growth for your firm.
Blending Old and New Ways of Working Lead to Internal Friction
Aligning the company to today’s sophisticated customer isn’t easy. Creating value for customers of today likely means working in new ways that may or may not be compatible with the old way. From an sales perspective, there can be several implications at the production level. To be successful, the people involved in the revenue growth processes, engineering processes, and operational processes of tomorrow must benefit from a top-to-bottom human capital enablement process designed to enable them to engage in more disciplined and complicated knowledge work.
To help employees make the shift to new ways of working, decisions need to be made, initiatives need to be launched, and actions need to be taken. The challenge becomes in creating purposeful, forward-learning activity that supports the employee of tomorrow while tuning the organization’s operating model to meet or exceed buyer expectations. This creates a gap that provides a massive opportunity for sales leaders who are willing to embrace the muddy waters of making this pivot from old to new.Shifting how people work to the new way will likely create friction as departments rethink their value contribution and groups of people learn to team together to create new outputs. This type of disruption is likely to occur various levels within the organization because employees aren’t necessarily equipped to cope with the various changes around them and leaders aren’t necessarily equipped to manage employees in the new way. Not tackling this challenge means business strategies will suffer from poor adoption and execution in the trenches will lag – creating frustrated employees who could likely feel like they need to operate in two ways at once (the “old way” and the “new way”).
Driving Strategic Shift – From What? To What?
Sales leaders are realizing they must manage and orchestrate a shift across people, process, and technology. To make the shift to a more customer-centric lens to the human capital challenge, sales managers are starting to take more of a tops-down approach to understand the business strategy and the gap between the current and future state, so they can successfully enable the employees to be successful in communicating value, delivering value, or creating value for customers. To get there, sales leaders are asking themselves:
- What should we do to revisit our human capital strategy and make sure it’s aligned to our business strategy? The reality: One product and services company hadn’t revisited the Sales Human Capital strategy in 20 years, while a hardware company simply never built a human capital strategy.
- What roles do we need to execute our strategy? The reality: In one company, nobody on the executive team thought through how new ways of working might require different sales team skills. You can’t get there “there” using what got you “here”.
- How do we define our roles more clearly so they add value to our customers? The reality: One systems integrator has over 300 different definitions of a “salesperson”.
- What skills do we need equip those sales roles with? The reality: A software company created over 550 hours of available service training making it impossible for service associates to figure out exactly what they need. While in another part of the organization, the learning team never invested the effort to train salespeople how to sell to executives ahead of the RFP, even though it was the clear differentiated sales strategy.
- How do we develop our existing sellers to work the new way? The reality: In a financial services firm, ongoing training is built with a rear-view mirror approach – only reinforcing old ways of working, while employees are repeatedly told to work in new ways.
- How do we source and select candidates for sales roles? The reality: In a services organization hiring is subjective and completely hit or miss because the work hasn’t been done to define roles clearly.
- How do we onboard new sales talent? The reality: New ways of working aren’t likely deployed in the competition’s organization, or in the school system therefore the gap between what new hires bring to the table versus what they need to produce to be successful is massive.
- How can we leverage our management team to reinforce our forward-leaning strategy and help our employees achieve our future state objectives? The reality: In one company, nobody enrolled management into a more coaching-oriented mindset to help employees work through the change required.
Since executing today’s customer-centric business strategies require people within a variety of product, marketing, or sales functions to work together within complex and changing businesses, the top-to-bottom human capital strategy must be reexamined to reduce the organizational drag that impedes the shift from the current state to the future state. This isn’t easy — since most employees have developed behaviors over decades of training and reinforcement that emphasizes siloed thinking and a deliverable-focused mindset rewarding random activities– instead of a cross-functional view of what needs to be done to drive outcomes that ensure customers realize the value they need.
As a sales leader, the key to success in driving the shift across your business lies in:
- Taking an outside-in view of work that needs to happen. Think about and define the clear interactions your company has with customers
- Creating a coalition of the willing. Find like minded people who can help you make progress against one of the 8 areas listed above.
- Making small gains that lead to bigger successes. Find an initiative that you can support to make progress and create impact.