Cross-Functional Learning Required for Success in Iraq & Sales Effectiveness
A few weeks ago Tom Friedman editorialized on whether the Iraqis learned anything from the US during the past 6 years.
That got me thinking about all the investment made in “sales training” in this country and worldwide ($7.2 billion estimated last year in the US alone). “…more than 1/2 the firms report investing $1500-7500 annually per sales rep…only one quarter of reps consistently use their company’s accepted methodology more than 1/2 the time, only 10% resolutely (greater than 90% of the time).
Friedman’s point is the Iraqis know who they have been, but they still haven’t figured out whom they want to become as a country, and that the current crop of Iraqi leaders right now isn’t doing much to overcome this.
Similarly I wonder whether sales/company execs really have learned anything from their rather significant investment. One study estimates only a dismal 2% bump in effectiveness. If so the management view could case closed don’t spend the $ ever again.
However just like the Iraqis, are there bigger unresolved issues which even after significant investment still need to be addressed?
In Iraq questions of how will power be shared, how will the awakening councils be absorbed into the government, how will rewards (wealth/power) from results (oil revenues) be split – all require agreement or compromise in order to move forward.
In selling focused organizations executives face a different set of issues, but no less of an imperative to reach agreement. How will the sales process be adopted? What level of sponsorship will be evidenced? What level of execution will be required? How will cross-functional stake holders be integrated? What is the impact on existing systems/strategies? What metrics will be used to guage success or failure? How will salespeople be recognized when help is needed AND what coaching/reinforcement will be provided?
All of these questions and many more need to be addressed by sales execs and companies or the result will likely be similar to Iraq – “the different ethnic communities still won’t want to compromise much either”.
Buying sales training alone is not enough for oranizations to improve results – much more thought, decisions, and commitments need to go into the formula to achieve success, in order to move the needle and impact real ROI/business results.
Just like Admiral Mullen recently told the Iraqi leaders “the US is not going to solve Iraq’s problems, that is the job of a sovereign nation…the coalition forces will leave soon” – sales development is a full time commitment for every organization, sales training & development firms can be resources but alone are not responsible for sales organization learning or the learning of executives either.
If your organization has invested or will invest sales training, what have you learned? For many companies it seems just like Iraq there still is a long way to go. Time to get to work.
Rethinking Customer Value
Let’s pretend for a moment I’m a sales or company executive. (I actually used to be one but that was long ago.) Sales are in the tank this year thanks to the global economy. We finished last month OK but H1 was a disaster, a bad Q1 followed by a worse Q2.
Staff reductions have been implemented earlier this year and we’ve cut budgets severely so thus far our numbers don’t look so bad to the street. Orders are down about 15% year to year, several of our largest customers have gone out of business, but our sales team sales they have some deals in the pipeline that should close soon.
I receive about 30 emails a day it seems from sales training firms. They must really be feeling the pinch too, each email reinforcing how their version of sales improvement will help improve business results. Boy, they must be desperate based on some of their headlines;
- “Easy ways to get a sure-fire boost to your sales productivity”
- “Convince me; why should we buy your product and not your competitors?”
- “Do your customer’s see your value? How do you know?”
These email messages remind me of SCUD missiles used in the Middle East a few years back; imprecise area bombs designed to impact perhaps more psychological damage than physical. Back to reality, I wonder “do our customers really understand the value we deliver?”
Recently I’ve heard a few stories of negotiations with customers where they continue to do business with us “because they like us, and we have a good relationship”, but I wonder what do they really value about doing business with us?
Wait a minute, do our salespeople really know the value we provide? I’ve noticed recently many of our reps are resisting putting too much information into our CRM system, and we continue to suffer through very high turnover of our reps.
And at dinner during our last sales meeting, I heard at least 6 different versions (from 6 sales reps) of the value we provide to our customers! I’m beginning to wonder…once upon a time we had a strong value proposition, now there seems to be lots of confusion and even resistance to selling value…perhaps we should look at updating it?
Hmmm…what about last month when one of our top 5 customers told us they wanted a 25% reduction in our prices. I asked the rep; what services do they not want us to provide anymore? She told me “they still want everything we’ve always provided just for less money”. And then she asked me to agree, so that we don’t lose one of our largest customers!
I wonder; is this some sort of tectonic shift in buyer/seller dynamics? Have buyers really become so much more professional, or as sellers have we just lost confidence is our own value? Who is supposed to be in charge of value anyway? Sales, marketing, executives…?
More questions flood my brain…
- What if the customers that cherry-pick us and those who stay because they like us aren’t so wrong?
- What if our customers have a better sense of our value than we do?
- What if our value is too hard to understand at the deal specific level?
- I wonder; is there any connection between what our salespeople say and do at the customer level, and our value proposition?
WHAT IF our value proposition has been on the shelf too long and our salespeople are having a hard time netting out value so that it makes sense to each customer? Maybe it is time to take it down, dust it off, and reassess our actual value at the street level.
Hmmm…maybe I won’t be able to get away on vacation later this month…
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