CHAPTER 6
Are We Expendable in Selling Today and what value you bring to the company?
What of the Future?
This chapter discusses the evolution of professional salespeople and the value they bring to selling in the modern age.
Sales in general has changed over the last few years. Salespeople can’t afford to be pushy, deceiving, lying, or any of those other nasty words. Buyers hold the power now. I am not drawing a line between professional salespeople and door–to-door salespeople, but today’s professional has evolved away from this older style into a more sophisticated salesperson.
According to research from Forrester, one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world, “over 1 million salespeople in America will be obsolete by 2020.”1 In fact, only one of the four salesperson types will survive the digital shift that we’re experiencing.
B2B and B2C Selling Types—What Is B2B Sales Experience?
A sales candidate was searching for a sales job and came across some sales job postings that required B2B sales experience. What is B2B, and how do you go about getting it? B2B is an acronym for business to business and in this case relates to business to business sales.
What’s the Difference?
B2B sales differs from B2C, or Business to Consumer. Both these descriptions are generic and pertain not only to the medical sales area but also to general sales. The main difference is the target audience for products or services. The call points are different, and the sales approach is different for each target. For example, a B2B (business 2 business), sales professional selling to a business will need to get past a gatekeeper and find the decision maker, which is typical of capital hospital sales. A B2B sales rep will need to identify the person with the buying power within an organization and get in front of him or her to sell their product or service. Selling directly to the consumer requires dealing with different buying cycles, and the decision-making process will be different.
A B2B sales professional might sell professional services such as health care, software, support, or consulting to other businesses. Selling in the B2B market space is different than in B2C (business 2 customer), but there are also selling skills that apply to both, so if you don’t have specific B2B sales skills, don’t count yourself out just yet. It is your job to identify the skills you have to match the needs of the hiring company.
Why Would a Company Request B2B Experience?
Any job opening requires the best candidate with certain skills and experience to hit the ground running and to bring results fast. The sales manager will not have to train a person with previous B2B sales experience on how to sell the product or service. So not all sales experience is the same, and for higher-priced or more technical products such as software, experience goes a long way.
Distributor to Customer Selling
This is another skill to demonstrate. What is different is that you are not selling for a principal manufacturer or global organization; you represent a product or group of products that is an agency for a manufacturer locally or overseas.
Selling under such circumstances is very different than in the case of the preceding styles. The product description and function are dictated by another company you indirectly represent while working for your distributor company as your direct employer.
Currently, Salespeople Fall into the Following Styles of Selling
An analysis of the main types of sales styles shows that we all generally fall into the following styles or a combination of several styles. Which one are you?
Figure 6.1 Various modes of customer buying
Who Is the Best Seller?
The best salesperson in this chart is said to be the challenger. He or she challenges the customer carefully, but the customer appreciates the counsel offered. The person who says, “I am a relationship builder first” is, unfortunately, not selling actively, being more concerned with building relationships and hoping sales will fall into his or her hands. The lone wolf can be a good sales person but wants management to leave him or her alone. Unfortunately, such salespersons are not team players and are seen as an outdated or dinosaur salespersons today.
It is helpful to incorporate traits from each of these types into your selling style, as, ultimately, there is not one that is the best or a combination of the best. I firmly believe that we all have a percentage of all of them but at varying levels to make up one rounded sales person. However, the challenger is always found to be the best and most successful seller.
So, to bring together our sales patterns of behavior and meet the future on how we seek information, are we heading in the right direction for the next 10 years? Where do we need to change, or should we just let things evolve naturally?
The overall driving force is what the customer needs. We can change our style, selling behavior, and many other facets of our sales persona, but, ultimately, the customer will drive the sellers out and into the field.
Consumer Buying Habits Today
The following graph shows lifestyle and business modes of buying, presented by HubSpot consumer behavior survey in 2016.
Figure 6.2 Consumer buyer behavior survey
Source: © HubSpot Consumer Behavior Survey 2016
As recently as 2016/2017 and 2018, this research showed a dramatic change in buyer methods of seeking information. We instinctively Google the product or service we need as a first move.
Studying global consumer trends clearly reveals that consumers want visual information, interesting articles to read, online education, and interactive visual stimulus. Interestingly, in the Australian research, all interviewees overwhelmingly replied that professional salespeople will be selling in similar positions within 10 years, citing the need for customer contact to engage the sale.
Traditional Sales Tactics Are Said to Be Outdated
Sales training companies, which are selling updated sales courses today, are inventing new and supposedly innovative ways to meet the new demands of sales. When you dig deeper into the content of these new sales training courses, you find the basics to be the same seven steps of the sale or a select part of the seven steps.
Pharmaceutical and medical device sales representatives face mounting challenges earning the all-important face time with health care buyers. Everyone is short on time, and no one wants to spend valuable minutes listening to a sales pitch for a product they’re not even sure they need.
Sales professionals have to work even harder to stand out of the crowd and capture the attention of their target prospects. On the other hand, going too hard will bring you down so fast that your customer base will not want to see you any further.
Buyers Want to Decide, Rather Than Be Sold Too; Is This True?
Today, the buyer is far better informed even before they see a sales person. Sales organizations that take a consultative approach provide their prospects with educational content that aids buying decisions, earning trust and establishing authority, which helps the company secure the sale.
We Should Change Our Selling Behavior
We all have to take this seriously. I started working in 1974 and had to totally reinvent myself many times. Think about how to continually update your technological knowledge. If you aren’t up on mobile tools, CRM (customer relationship management), and general technology trends, you may not even know what to sell and how to position it. Yes, we should continually be altering our skills and style to meet the market expectations today.
Read as Much as You Can
Today, tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the web, in general, are rapidly becoming reading systems and industry forums for our customers. If you subscribe to the people and topics you like, you will start to see articles and news on your industry that will rapidly bring you “into the market” and help you see what is going on and what you need to learn.
In my estimate, within 10 years about 60 percent of the sales situations currently being handled by salespeople will be handled automatically; however, there will continue to be a need for salespeople in the following situations:
Situations Where the Customer Needs Assistance
The Customer Cannot Define a Solution
For example, a company might understand that it’s experiencing manufacturing delays and know exactly where those delays are taking place but lack the expertise to change the process or technology in order to reduce or eliminate them. In this case, the customer will turn to a salesperson to define and propose a solution and perhaps come up with a product that may correct the problem. This is where the challenger could play a useful role as an advisor.
The Customer Cannot Calculate the Return on Investment (ROI)
For example, a company’s executives may intuitively understand that purchasing a system to make manufacturing run more efficiently would be a wise investment but may still not be able to calculate whether the ROI of an in-house system would be greater than one that was outsourced. In this case, the customer will turn to a salesperson to help create a business case for purchasing the solution.
Salesperson to Customer
Although we can assume our customer has researched well prior to the sales call, we must not assume they have all the facts. Listening to the need first will give you a starting position for product placement. The customer may merely want to see the product so it matches the image they have in their own mind—the curiosity factor.
The customer will be, as now, entrusted with fully investigating several similar products and will need to feel, touch, and assess. A sales person will also need to survey or trial the product intention. Selling in the future will be specific in that the product must be exactly what the customer needs. There will be a firming up of relationships, including questioning such things as service, warranty, and costing in this mix.
Conclusion
Today, we’re observing a rapid adoption of game-changing technologies like voice search and conversational UI (user interfaces). As big players like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and even Tesla, push their innovations forward, we’re on the cusp of another major shift in consumer behavior. For businesses, many of these new technologies and resulting behaviors that they will create will bring about even more channels for their products to be discovered by consumers.
Conversational interface is any user interfaces (UI) that mimics chatting with a real human. The idea here is that instead of communicating with a computer on its own inhuman terms by clicking on icons and entering syntax-specific commands, you interact with it on yours, by just telling it what to do. The use of UI now is so integrated into sales and customer interaction that it has the potential to take over the primary investigative phase of buying.
From the Management Point of View
Executives struggle with how salespeople should add value, especially in today’s multichannel environment, along with marketing being pulled into the sales combination.
Greater professionalization is needed in countries where the state of the profession is less developed. Emergent strategy is practiced, though not universally. Sales executives generally believe that little incremental value in technology can be gained, though it is apparent that technology is not being fully utilized. Technology is racing very fast for us. Are we keeping up?
Does the customer want interaction, and at what stage of the sale process? How do we gauge when to come in and when to leave? Training on this very important subject is imperative. No sales training I have seen incorporates this, but I believe this is the key to customer interaction in the future.
When we go back to the “great divide” subject, this exemplifies the problem between sales, sales management, and marketing having a go at what type of UI promotion should be opened.
So, Are Sales Professionals Expendable in the Future?
The answer is, possibly “yes” because there is an element of unknown in how general professional sales is moving. Alternatively, I firmly believe that the customer, in general, wants point of sale to customer interaction, especially if the sale is high in cost and there are mutable key decision makers.
So, do we feel we are becoming obsolete yet? Yes and no. If we continue to multiply our way of engaging the customer on a more helpful and realistic basis, I think we will still be doing the same but slightly different in our job function for decades to come. That’s the good news.
Technology and the Implications for Us as Salespeople
Major global companies provide us with VPN (virtual private network), mobile communications, and selling aids within these devices we carry around. Communication to customers now is immediate, and this is the customer expectation. Product information, quotes, and other information are able to be sent on the run. No longer do we need to have marketing personnel send out this information if it is at the salespersons’ fingertips.
So, what are the implications for our health, family life, and work processes, and does technology assist us to get the business in the end? The overriding technology (software) is CRM, Oracle, Net Suite, Pipedrive, and Sales Force, which are just some of the software offerings utilized out there.
The Positives and Downsides to Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)
Missing Key Information
CRM data often contains gaps in information. Relying on basic demographic data or purchase history is no longer sufficient. Supplement basic information with more detailed information, such as purchasing preferences or web history. Without this type of information, it’s difficult to understand how to reach customers effectively.
The positives are varied and comprehensive. Starting a new job with your entire customer base recorded and a list of the past customer interactions is wonderful. In a way, just pick up from the last representative and start sales calls. I am told new editions of CRM are addressing these issues. One word of warning: When starting, do not spend too much time on the CRM data; do it quickly and get out there selling.
Out-of-Date Information
Customer information changes often, but the data that marketers mostly use to reach customers doesn’t always update as quickly as we’d like. Whether a consumer has moved to a new city or has changed his or her purchasing habits, campaigns will not be effective if marketers are relying on information that does not update as customers change their jobs and move on.
Incorrect or Unverified Data
Similarly, the data used for marketing campaigns needs to be accurate from the start. Marketers often rely on unverified data that could be incorrect. For marketing campaigns to be effective, it is crucial for marketers to reach consumers in a highly targeted way. Without verifying information, marketing efforts and resources could be wasted.
Lack of Insight
Even if CRM data is up to date and accurate, it’s still just data. It provides marketers with as much information as possible about a customer but doesn’t reach conclusions. Marketers need to use this information to uncover their own insights to effectively reach consumers at the right time, through the right channel and with the right message. The marketing department should utilize the contacts area to further update customers with new products that are related to each specific sales group.
Inability to Find New Prospects
While CRM data can be useful for reaching current customers, it does not help sales reach new customers. It’s important for marketers to effectively reach consumers who have the potential to become loyal, long-term customers.
Privacy Concerns
CRM databases are not responsive to the challenges of multichannel marketing in an increasingly privacy-protected society. It is important for marketers to identify and contact clients and prospects according to their unique privacy requirements.
CRM data can be very useful and often leads to highly successful campaigns. But marketers need to keep these potential issues in mind before relying on this information. Overlooking these common problems leads to incomplete or inaccurate profiles of your customers and can lead companies down the wrong path.
Using CRM on the Mobile
My 10 consecutive years using CRM were great, and I won a national award for its use. My constant complaint to management was that CRM was unable to update a sale call on your mobile; I hope the new version of CRM has solved this.
Overall, CRM has been a great technical introduction and aid to salespeople, not forgetting its usefulness to management. We have long felt the critical need to save time in our sales job, and CRM provides the answer to this vexatious problem.
I loved using CRM, which has proved to be a great product, as with many other similar kinds of software.
Note: Permission given to author to use CRM product as reference from Darshi McKenzie Microsoft Dynamics 2017.
- CRM growth not slowing down: According to a forecast, the CRM market will be worth $37 billion in 2017. Since 2011, each year around 70 percent of businesses have consistently stated that they plan to increase spending on technology such as this.
Years ago, salespeople resisted CRM, but embracing such technology now is imperative, and most professional salespeople currently accept a form of CRM and utilize the benefits accordingly. When using CRM software to collect customer information, e-mail addresses, private and work contact numbers, and notes regarding meetings, ensure that customers have been asked for their permission in writing. I would suggest that many customers may not have given permission to use their sensitive information. Good business practice makes it both vital and ethical to have the customer’s permission.
- Temptations: In the early days of CRM, you would finish up around 3 p.m. in the field, not see any further customers, and fill in the day’s activities. Filling in data for CRM information about the previous or full day’s activity is essential, but the question is, when do I do this task? The new features added to CRM give you the opportunity to update information on your tablet or mobile, which is a huge time-saving advantage.
- Sales force automation systems: Businesses without automation spend 71 percent of their time and resources planning and defining business processes. Selling requires a number of tedious, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks, such as scheduling sales appointments, sending follow-up e-mails, and updating sales opportunities, all of which reduce productivity and profitability.
- Sales force automation (SFA) technology solutions automate many tasks, freeing up sales employees to focus on activities that generate more sales and revenue. SFA allows sales managers to keep their teams up to date on current and new products and services. With SFA, managers can also have instant access to activities of individual sales employees, sales figures, opportunities, customer complaints, and other data used to determine sales success. Armed with information provided in real time, managers can take action and make adjustments quickly to optimize efforts.
- Mobile technology: The proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has changed many aspects of the selling process forever. For customers, the ability to research, evaluate, and purchase products and services online using this technology has transformed the buying experience. Sales teams should take this into account.2
1 Forrester United States.
2 Executives’ perspectives of the changing role of the sales profession: views from France, the United States, and Mexico. The customer relationship management (CRM) market will be worth $37 billion in 2017. CRN and a clear explanation of the new way of customer recording software.