Last week I met with several clients and interviewed sales and marketing professionals. Here is the story of two sales people …

It’s 7:30 am and I’m having coffee with John, he is alert, taking notes, challenging what I have to say, and sharing his insights. For example, we agree that the portion of the sales cycle that a sales person can control is much shorter and that this is an area where marketing has yet to catch up. We agree that buyers are much smarter. We also agree that the best sales people see technology as an ally, not an impediment. “Anything that helps me keep up with my clients, their market challenges and my schedule is a godsend”. John gets it. He sees that things have changed and that being a life-long learner is critical. For two hours, I had his undivided attention and he has mine. I want to stay in touch with this person.

Paul and I met just before lunch. Much of that time I spent meeting with his Blackberry which interrupted us on a regular basis. Rather than asking why I had taken a particular position on a sales topic, he would find fault with the premiss. When pushed, he had very little data to back up his assertions. The meeting was over within a half an hour and I don’t think I see a need to network with Paul.

Now I’ll come clean. Each of these meetings was part of a blind interview process where I knew very little about the status of the candidates. We ran several of these interviews over the course of a week and found that the majority of our candidates were risk adverse, uncomfortable with technology, and still considered selling to be something where educating the buyer and controlling the sale were much of what any good sales person did. The majority of people who fell on this side of the line were unemployed or under employed. Those that embraced technology and were paying attention to markets and business were thriving.

From a different perspective, we found that we had two clusters of candidates. Those who were open and embraced change and those who were closed and expected the world to conform to their view. Which group do you think will thrive in 2012?

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It’s time to play catch-up or better yet, leap frog some internal challenges. For the past year, I’ve been speaking to business audiences about the importance of seeing the enterprise as a single social entity that knows enough about about customer/client behavior to change competitive landscapes. The challenge for many businesses is that they still direct and manage their organizations in a way that re-enforces a culture of silos. Silos as it turns out, fear the sharing of information and this is the exact opposite of what customers and clients have outside the business.

What starts on the outside finds its way in

Did your organization once block email? The Internet? Is it blocking social tools? I’m not talking about facebook, I’m talking about information sharing platforms that make it easier to understand, market to, sell to, and support clients or customers? Like most of the tools businesses once thought were evil, internal social platforms have the ability to transform the inside of a business from a culture of walled competition to cooperative success. IMHO, ignoring these platforms is a sign that some organizations reward building fiefdoms over satisfying customers.

Remember that customers and clients use social technologies to simplify their lives everyday and they come to expect the businesses they buy from to do the same.

What are your thoughts on tools that are banned from business and the reasons why?

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For start ups and new ideas there is something intoxicating about the word disruptive. It many cases, the organization looks at the competitive landscape and concludes their idea to be disruptive and to a certain degree they may be right. Disrupt a competitor and they might take their eye of the ball. But it is not the competitor a smart company looks to disrupt, it is the competitor’s consumer. A true disruptive idea has taken into consideration the nature of the buyer, their habits and behaviors in the same way a well thought out sales and marketing strategy has thought through the Ideal Market and Client Profiles to the point where certain needs can be directly addressed in a disruptive way. In other words – Our messages directly address known and or unknown pains and open the door to a discussion about solutions that are directly beneficial to the buyer’s top or bottom line. To displace a current method or idea, we listen more than talk to uncover more opportunities where we can add value. This is very much the same way social media works for companies floating new ideas.Talking too much is a sign that a sales representative is interested in his or herself is more interested in how great their product or service is, not the pain the buyer is experiencing.

Here are a few points to consider:

• Disruption in sales and marketing requires a complete understanding of the buyers environment, motivators and assumptions
• In order to be disruptive, communications must displace something that is important enough to the buyer to motivate them to take action
• Unless the pain is grater than other buyer considerations, the sale will not close
• Pushing the buyer (not listening) will increase resistance
• Manipulating the buyer will cause eventual backlash and with social media as a tool, the buyer may damage to the brand

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Is the Concept Disruptive?

Lets say that we want to disrupt the home delivery of bottled water. We create a filtration system. On the surface this idea could save a consumer hundreds of dollars a year. It is cheaper than delivery and takes up less space, or does it? In reality, a device has to be attached to a faucet or take up room in the refrigerator rather than occupy space on the floor. From the consumer’s point of view, until the cost of bottled water rises, other methods of filtering water become more friendly, or they understand the cost offset, the inconvenience factor is not enough to disrupt their current behavior.

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What is the most important factor to consider when naming something in the B2B space? For most businesses without money to spend on marketing campaigns, the most important thing to consider when naming a new business, division, product or service is buyer perception. A few marketers might take me to task on this, but I assure you that thinking like the person who has to take your proposal to the board or the decision maker is the key.

It is Wednesday afternoon at our fictitious company Credit Systems & Compliance and the board is meeting to review proposals for a two million dollar purchase. There are three companies on the shortlist. Each has a very good reputation in the market, provides outstanding service, and solid after-the-sale support. The bids are all within 3% of the same number. Which company do you think the board will go with?

Financial Playground?
Sampson Systems?
Financial Decision Metrics Corporation?

If you answered Financial Decision Metrics Corporation, you would be right and here’s why:
Of the company names above, which one:

Has a name that begins to describe what the business does?
Requires little or no explanation?
Is easy to recommend to a colleague without explanation as to why you would do business with a company with a name like that?
Reminds the buyer of themselves?

Dale Carnage once changed the name of a manufacturing plant to win a contract over a competitor. Very smart thinking. What Carnage understood was this – The buyer’s comfort is more important than a preconceived notion of self-importance. While we think new and interesting names are cool, they are, but when they require an explanation or a defense, they become impediments to a sale.

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In a time when automation and efficiently are at the forefront of internal corporate directives, Sales and Marketing need to stop and listen to not only the customer, but to each other.

A major player in the hardware arena known for manufacturing systems that are well engineered made a change in their product line that had major repercussions on sales of one of their lines. The change involves access to the hard drive. The engineers in the company were proud that they had reduced the manufacturing cost of the machine by a few dollars by removing the hard drive access panel. After all, their drives rarely failed so why would a customer need access to them? The engineering team scored this one as a win.
But did they win with the customer?

It turns out that most portable computers suffer cracked LCDs from being dropped and while a broken LCD can be remedied in an hour or less, the part is not always on-hand. Without a part, your customer may be without their machine for a few days. Smart corporate customers who were thinking about their internal efficiency saw the drive access panel as a time saver allowing them to hot swap machines. A customer has a broken LCD? Just pop open the drive access panel, pull the drive and install it in another machine and send the customer on their way. Order the LCD, replace it a week later and then swap the drive back out.
With the drive bay sealed up, a tech now has to disassemble the unit to remove the drive and place it in another machine. To the customer, this is not a win; it is a reason to switch to another vendor. For sales, they can no longer site the case study and use this as selling point.

R&D, Engineering and Marketing can all gain a wealth of information by sharing proposed line changes with Sales and then testing the feedback. Why test the feedback? We appreciate our sales people, but we know that sometimes they ask for features or functions that may benefit one out of hundreds of customers. In this case, simply asking Sales and then validating the response with the customer would have saved the company millions in lost sales.

Listen, ask questions, verify answers and then make changes. A small change that might save three dollars on a device costing hundreds may have have impacts in the place your business can least afford them. With the customer.
Call us today for a free sales and marketing consultation and to receive a free copy of our integrated sales & marketing toolkit. 410.782.0360.

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