Give us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for—because unless we stand for something we shall fall for anything.
—Peter Marshall
The ultimate goal of any reader of this book is to improve sales team performance in his or her organization. To do that, we must proceed with a shared understanding of the context in which change is to be effected. That context is created by several major elements:
In this chapter, we review these elements and set the stage for an entirely new approach to sales training and development—an approach that stems from a new competency model designed for all members of the sales profession and that clearly spells out what sales team members need to know and be able to do at work, depending on the role they are playing at the time.
Technological advances over the past two decades have shrunk our world, creating a global economy that is rich in information. This new, smaller world has changed the relationship between buyer and seller permanently; consequently, salespeople have had to adapt. Empowered, informed buyers require innovative approaches to reach them. Salespeople have invented such new techniques as category management, buyer facilitation, and team selling. In a classic snowball effect, these new techniques have created the need for new and expanded knowledge, skills, and abilities on the part of the salesperson. Therefore, global market development trends have powerful implications for salespeople, the sales profession itself, and for sales organizations.
The ASTD 2008 World-Class Sales Competency Study team identified five major trends driving change in the sales profession. These trends and their implications were identified through extensive research that included
Category management: a retailing concept in which the total range of products sold by a retailer is broken down into discrete groups of similar or related products; these groups are known as product categories. An important facet of category management is the shift in the relationship between retailer and supplier: Instead of the traditional adversarial relationship, the relationship moves to one of collaboration, exchange of information and data, and joint business building. The focus of all negotiations is centered on the effects of the turnover of the total category, not just the sales on the individual products therein (Jones, Stevens, and Chonko, 2005).
Buyer facilitation: a customer-focused selling approach that begins with identifying the buyer’s needs and proceeds through providing information, educating the buyer, and then demonstrating the product’s value and results; emphasizes influence over manipulation (Hall, 1999).
Team selling: using the full resources of your company to sell an account through all of their relevant decision makers (Waterhouse Group, 2007).
Consultative selling: a sales approach that depends on a relationship between buyer and seller, featuring trust, credibility, and mutual understanding; leverages the value proposition and a compelling business case for the solution (Consultative Selling, www.sales-sense.com).
Every day, more companies are developing strategies to distribute their products or services to new customers, in new industries, and in more locations. Salespeople are often the front line of a company’s presence in a new country, but can face potential language, cultural, and geographic challenges that require specialized knowledge to overcome. These dynamics increase the level of teaming necessary to create the right solution to meet customer demands. These teaming requirements can strain communications and information flow across departmental boundaries and slow down the solution definition process that leads to the creation of powerful customer presentations. Understanding logistical implications as well as cultural differences within the buyer-seller relationship poses a unique challenge to sales success and is critical to sustaining long-term relationships.
As organizations seek to expand, intense and often brutal competition can be a fact of business life. Historically, strategy development was typically the purview of the marketing function, and execution was the responsibility of the sales team. Today, savvy sales managers have come to realize that success will not come in a strategic void. Selling is volatile and changing; a hierarchical approach to planning and execution does not meet the requirements for agility in a churning sales landscape. To meet revenue goals while penetrating customer organizations and maintaining solid customer relationships, frontline sales managers must be empowered to make decisions, maintain momentum in the sales process, and acquire the right resources in support of the sale. Sales teams must have (and sales trainers must develop) strategy-building capabilities to cultivate customer-centered relationships and create adept responses to opportunities, requirement changes, and competitive threats as they emerge.
To stay competitive, organizations must increase their ability to create and disseminate knowledge, yet workers’ ability to process and retain enormous amounts of information has been stretched to the limit. For salespeople, these natural human limitations can strain the buyer-seller relationship. The field of professional selling has attempted to leverage technology to make up for those normal human limitations and to facilitate the buying-selling process.
Salespeople are no longer the gatekeepers of information about products and services. Buyers pursue their own early education, which forces salespeople to enter the process later. As a result, salespeople have fewer opportunities to define customer needs or answer questions about client specifications and business goals. It is more difficult for organizations to build customer loyalty by leveraging a personal approach in the sales process, requiring sales teams to be more exact and precise after the buyer does engage. This smaller margin for error demands the increased sophistication of sales-team technology, which salespeople must become skilled at using. Handheld devices, mobile computing, instant messaging, and social networking have revolutionized how salespeople navigate the sales processes.
Technological advances have created new venues and channels for selling. For example, the “click to talk live” feature of many websites blends customer service with telesales in a call-center environment. Selling is also becoming the responsibility of nontraditional sales roles, and companies are cross-training installation, service, product-development, and other staff in sales techniques.
Buyers are increasingly sophisticated. Their knowledge of sales processes, sales tactics, and your competitors’ offerings continually grows—making it harder to identify, negotiate, and close deals. Considering that these same buyers are expecting the sales professional to share the responsibility of achieving positive outcomes for the buyer’s business, salespeople are often overwhelmed when their own company adds its own change initiatives to the mix. So how do the leaders of your organization manage these dynamics? How do they divide their time between revenue generation and cost management activities? With all of the shifts and pressures in the market, is it enough?
Sales managers must balance the tension of building a culture of teamwork with the need for increased levels of praise and feedback for individual achievement. Compounding the difficulty of these changes is the desire of younger employees who are seeking, and even demanding, to relate to their leaders as peers.
—Tim Ohai, president, Growth & Associates
For the first time in history, sales managers may find themselves managing members of three or four distinct generations in the workplace. In industrialized markets, these diverse workers bring differing approaches to their work, their learning, and the ways in which they respond to management and hierarchy. While many older workers prefer to work independently, younger workers place value on collaboration and enjoy working in teams. While older workers respect tenure and experience, younger workers expect a flatter organization and a say in their work and how they approach it. These differences call for adjustments on both organizational and personal levels.
Organizationally, managers must strive to build a less rigid, nonhierarchical environment within the sales organization that encourages independence and shared authority. Sales managers must balance building a team culture with the need for individual recognition.
Younger employees seek, and even demand, to relate to their leaders as peers. They are forcing changes within the sales team, causing a ripple effect in talent management, leadership development, and organizational performance strategies. On a personal level, sales managers must be willing to let go of what has made them successful in previous years and embrace what will make them successful in the years to come.
The United States and many other industrialized nations are also facing the imminent retirement of hundreds of thousands of skilled, knowledgeable workers. Despite the fact that technology has rendered many jobs obsolete, the need for skilled salespeople remains great: In its 2007 Talent Shortage Survey, Manpower discovered—for the second year in a row—that business-to-business sales positions are the hardest to fill in the United States and several other countries. A 2007 survey by CSO Insights revealed that nearly 15 percent of responding organizations planned to increase the size of their sales teams by 21 percent or more (Dickie and Trailer, 2007).
While most other professions can rely on a steady supply of potential employees from high school, college, or workforce-development programs, the sales profession lacks a comparable system to generate new talent. Over the past five years, colleges and universities have begun to offer courses in professional selling, but not nearly enough to meet the need.
Talent management: ASTD defines talent management as an organizational approach to leading people by building culture, engagement, capability, and capacity through integrated talent acquisition, development, and deployment processes that are aligned to business goals.
Leadership development: any activity that enhances the quality of leadership within an individual or organization and that focuses on developing the leadership abilities and attitudes of individuals.
Organizational performance: the outputs or results of an organization as measured against its goals and objectives. (Source: ASTD)
Al Pelham, PhD, of the College of New Jersey, has researched gaps in sales training content and delivery. In his work, he cites emerging trends toward greater salesperson responsibility for reducing buyer logistics costs, higher standards of quality control, greater mass-customization potential, and an increased demand for sellers to be problem solvers, not just pushers of standard problem solutions. Pelham says, “Salespeople need to upgrade their knowledge of the customer, the customer’s industry, and the customer’s customer” (Pelham, 2006).
Salespeople need to probe for problems, needs, and opportunities that are top-of-mind for the buyer.
—Tom Snyder, Huthwaite
Buyer expectations are rapidly changing. As they become more knowledgeable and informed, they expect the same from salespeople. They expect salespeople to be stakeholders in the success of both organizations and to work as partners to find advantageous business solutions. Increased competition means that buyers have many more choices and can be more discriminating and demanding. Further, the requirements of a rigid bottom line and brutal competition have driven the commoditization of many products.
Changing demographics have a notable effect on sales organizations across a variety of industries and geographies. In a 2006 IBM and ASTD study on the impact of changing workforce demographics on the learning function, 239 learning executives identified their primary concerns regarding this generational shift:
The word sell is derived from the Icelandic word selja and the Anglo Saxon word syllan; both mean “to serve” or “to give.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines a sale as “the exchange of goods or services for an amount of money or its equivalent [or] the act of selling.”
A sale must therefore be a unique transaction with deliverables and an exchange of money or its equivalent. A transaction is a distinct event in the overall sales process.
A sales process is a series of tactical and strategic steps that leads to the sales transaction. Sales processes comprise methodologies or approaches designed to help the selling organization close more business deals.
The buyer-seller relationship contract has irrevocably changed. Here is how:
Increased responsibility for the salesperson. Buyers are demanding more. Higher expectations for attaining business results are being placed on sales professionals by buyers who are expected to make the correct purchase decision.
Buyers are now demanding an understanding of their business, objective interpretation of their needs, and a clearer translation into implementation actions.
—Dave Stein, ES Research Group
Salespeople are under increased pressure to attain the goals of both the selling organization and the buying organization. Salespeople are learning that they must be willing to accept responsibility for ensuring the success of the buyer and the seller, as defined by each party.
Increased emphasis on consultative selling. Salespeople continue to transition from transactional selling to consultative selling, which leverages a true partnership mentality. More firms are striving to become trusted advisors to their customers. As a result, salespeople are focusing on developing deeper relationships and personal networks inside their target companies as well as within the specific industry.
Skills such as listening, analyzing, problem solving, and questioning help buyers navigate the complexity of the solution and the plethora of available information. Communication skills such as active listening can help sellers identify root problems and hidden obstacles that affect the buyer’s business success. Building rapport, demonstrating patience, and exercising astute timing contribute to building the foundation for a trusting buyer-seller relationship.
Increased seller responsiveness. Historically, the role of the sales manager has been to focus on monthly or quarterly results. That environment forces many sales professionals into a commodity selling situation that is more transactional, especially when the end of the month is near. However, in today’s competitive landscape, sales must focus on maintaining professionalism with buyers who may not have the same timeframe in mind or who may have strong negotiating skills. The salesperson must stay focused on delivering value to the buyer based on mutually agreed-upon goals and objectives. This requires taking the client’s best interest into account while providing a relevant solution to the business issues at hand.
Increased emphasis on profitability. Traditionally, sales organizations have focused on volume of individual activity as an indicator of productivity. As such, the sales professional’s compensation came when he or she met or exceeded his or her sales quotas. Now, more firms are examining the profitability and productivity of salesperson activity, rather than frequency or volume.
Organizations are working hard to ensure their sales team members use time appropriately and productively. Sales training and development professionals are uniquely positioned to work with salespeople to help them be productive, profitable, and, ultimately, world class.
How well do your sales training efforts keep pace with change? Check the items that represent strengths for you:
Profession: An occupation, such as law, medicine, or engineering, that requires considerable training and specialized study.
—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth edition
As we have discussed, the buyer-seller relationship has undergone many changes over time. Salespeople have attempted to rise to the challenge of meeting or exceeding buyer expectations. Often, theirs has been a reactive approach to market, buyer, and technological forces. The same has been true for the development of sales training approaches—reactive, rather than proactive, and they are often outdated by the time they are rolled out.
Further, sales training often takes place in a vacuum. There is no clear professional consensus on the roles salespeople play and the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed in those roles. Salespeople have been left to develop their own unique approaches and, in many cases, to pursue their own training where they can find it.
To become truly competent, salespeople must learn to customize and personalize their approaches based on inputs from buyers. It requires each
salesperson to deliver value to the customer in a uniquely tailored fashion and to define what is expected of a competent professional. But, without a universal framework around which to build that definition, true effectiveness has been elusive.
To lay out what knowledge, skills, and abilities are necessary for the successful salesperson, we must first arrive at a useful definition for the profession itself. This involves setting some boundaries, identifying what lies within the scope of the sales profession and what should remain outside it. To establish those boundaries, the ASTD 2008 World-Class Sales Competency Study team agreed that the successful selling organization involves more people than just those individuals who carry a sales quota—but does not include the entire revenue-generation system required by companies.
No widely accepted definition of professional selling existed at the time our research commenced. The research team realized that it was difficult for
academics, practitioners, consultants, and trainers to move the profession forward in its absence. Therefore, the research team attempted to answer the following questions:
To help with these research questions, the team crafted a definition of professional selling that placed the profession within the context of the promotion mix while establishing its boundaries.
To ASTD, the sales profession is
“The occupation required to effectively develop,
manage, enable, and execute a mutually beneficial, interpersonal exchange of goods, services, or solutions for equitable value within the full context of the buying and selling relationship.”
The ramifications of this definition should not be underestimated. This definition not only helps frame the model found within World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies, but also helps the advancement of the sales profession. This definition sets forth that
This definition has become the foundation upon which the ASTD 2008 World-Class Sales Competency Study was built. With the adoption of this definition, selling should no longer be viewed as an isolated or purely tactical function. Rather, the profession has evolved to include people who perform multiple sales-related roles. These roles include not only people who carry sales quotas, but also those who perform related tasks in the context of a larger, shared performance culture.
The sales profession includes all of the people in an organization who are directly responsible for sales performance, whether they directly sell or support those who do. All of these people are aware of the organization’s business strategy and leverage technology in pursuit of its goals, but they vary in their job duties and measures of success. Together, these individuals work together to accomplish the revenue-acquisition goals of the organization alongside their counterparts in marketing, advertising, public relations, and promotion.
To define the boundaries of the sales profession, it is useful to understand the occupation of sales itself and its relationship to other occupations. The sales occupation is generally considered to be part of the marketing profession. This profession is largely concerned with what academics and practitioners call the “Four Ps” of marketing: product, price, placement, and promotion. The Four Ps work together to help an organization increase market share, build customer loyalty and trust, and bring solutions to market. For the purposes of this report, the relationship of selling to the marketing profession was analyzed.
Within the Four Ps, selling usually is found within the promotion mix and is often called “professional selling” (see figure 1-1). Understanding the promotion mix and the relationship of selling to other pursuits within the promotion mix raises the question, “How does professional selling differ from advertising, public relations, and sales promotions?”
Advertising: leverages the use of nonpersonal media, such as periodicals, television, and radio, to shape market perception.
Public relations: uses “push” techniques, such as press releases and speaking engagements, to promote and polish the organization’s public image. Professional selling: defined as face-to-face and personal promotion of the marketing and sales message to current and prospective buyers. Sales promotions: leverages specific techniques designed to boost sales, such as coupons, contests, special pricing, and so forth.
Most people are familiar with these efforts as they are used by prominent consumer brands, such as food, fuel, and pharmaceutical companies.
Within advertising, public relations, and sales promotions, the requirements and advancement paths are clearly defined. Trade organizations, educational conferences, and university degree programs have formalized requirements for success in these professions. Each of these occupations has defined its boundaries and set expectations for the professional members.
Unfortunately, professional selling has not followed suit in its definition and professional rigor. In fact, the debate still continues as to whether the sales profession is a profession at all.
People who meet the definition of professional selling typically fall into one of four functional areas: personal selling, sales operations, sales training and development, and sales management:
These four functional areas must work together in a world-class sales organization.
How well do you understand the sales organization’s business strategies? Here are some ways to increase the relevancy and timeliness of your approach. Check all those that represent areas of strength for you:
Our new definition of professional selling makes clear who is part of the sales profession and what they do. This understanding helps to determine, then, what those sales professionals need to know and do to be successful. Chapter 2 describes the rise of the sales professional as a knowledge worker, shows how the shift to consultative selling requires new competencies, and demonstrates how the sales process must be aligned to competencies to create a world-class sales organization.