In the previous two chapters, you learned about engaging customers and communicating customer value through integrated marketing communications (IMC) and two elements of the promotion mix: advertising and public relations. In this chapter, we examine two more IMC elements: personal selling and sales promotion. Personal selling is the interpersonal arm of marketing communications, in which the sales force engages customers and prospects to build relationships and make sales. Sales promotion consists of short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service. Although this chapterpresents personal selling and sales promotion as separate tools, they must be carefully integrated with the other elements of the promotion mix.
First, let’s look at a real-life sales force. When you think of salespeople, perhaps you think of pushy retail sales clerks, “yell and sell” TV pitchmen, or the stereotypical glad-handing “used-car salesman.” But such stereotypes don’t fit the reality of most of today’s salespeople—sales professionals who succeed not by taking advantage of customers but by listening to their needs and helping to forge solutions. Consider Salesforce—the industry leader in customer relationship management solutions. Salesforce not only produces market-leading sales management software, it also excels at practicing what it preaches—effective personal selling.
SALESFORCE: You Need a Great Sales Force to Sell Salesforce
Salesforce is way out in front of the $20 billion market for customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. The Salesforce logo, set inside the image of a puffy cloud, underscores Salesforce’s highly successful cloud-based computing model (no software to install or own). Cloud-based systems are common today, but they were state-of-the-art when Salesforce pioneered the concept more than 15 years ago. Since then, the company has established itself as a leading innovator, constantly finding new ways to help client companies connect with customers and achieve greater sales force effectiveness using the latest online, mobile, social, and cloud technologies.
Salesforce helps businesses to “supercharge their sales.” It supplies what it calls a “Customer Success Platform,” a wide array of cloud-based sales force automation and customer relationship management tools that gather, organize, analyze, and disseminate in-depth data about a company’s customers, sales, and individual sales rep and overall sales force performance. From its home in the cloud, Salesforce makes all these data and analyses readily available anytime, from anywhere, on any device with online access—desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones. Salesforce also integrates with major social media, providing tools for social media monitoring and real-time customer engagement and collaboration on its Salesforce Chatter platform, a kind of Facebook for enterprises.
Salesforce’s innovative products have made it the world’s number-one and fastest-growing CRM platform, ahead of blue-chip competitors such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM. The company’s revenues hit $6.2 billion last year, up an impressive 24 percent over the previous year and more than four times what they were just five years ago. Salesforce has placed first or second on Forbes World’s Most Innovative Company in any industry list for six straight years.
Innovative products and platforms have played a major role in Salesforce’s stunning success. But even the best products don’t sell themselves. You need a great sales force to sell Salesforce, and the company excels at practicing what it preaches—effective personal selling. Like the companies that buy its services, Salesforce has its own army of experienced, well-trained, highly motivated sales reps who take the company’s products to customers. In many respects, Salesforce’s own sales force serves as a model for the products and services it sells—not just for using the Salesforce cloud but more generally for achieving the “supercharged” sales force results that the company promises its clients.
At Salesforce, developing an outstanding sale force starts with recruiting and hiring top-notch salespeople. Salesforce’s aggressive but highly selective recruiting program skims the cream off the top of the global sales rep candidate pool. Each year on average, Salesforce hires only 4.5 percent of the more than 100,000 candidates who applied. Experience counts. Salesforce expects a minimum of two years of prior sales experience for small-business sales reps and up to two decades of experience for sales execs assigned to major accounts. To find such experienced candidates, Salesforce freely raids rival companies for new hires, counting on its high-energy culture and strong compensation packages to lure successful salespeople into the Salesforce fold.
Once hired, as you might expect, Salesforce salespeople have access to all the latest high-tech selling tools. In fact, the first major assignment of new hires is to study 20 hours of at-home video that teaches them the ins and outs of the Salesforce technologies that they won’t be just selling but also using. But Salesforce would be the first to tell you that, although its cloud wizardry can help to optimize customer contact and the selling process, it doesn’t take the place of good personal selling skills. So in training and fine-tuning its own sales force, the company starts by preaching tried-and-true selling fundamentals, tempered by its own modern twists.
The first fundamental of good selling at Salesforce is to listen and learn . As new recruits go through Salesforce’s weeklong selling boot camp, taught at the company’s Salesforce U, they learn that they should begin building customer relationships by asking probing questions and getting customers to talk, seeking to understand everything they can about a customer’s situation and needs. “Eighty-five percent of salespeople don’t slow down enough to really understand their customer’s business,” says a senior Salesforce sales executive.
Understanding the customer leads to a second selling fundamental: empathize —let customers know that you understand their issues and feel their pain. Empathy builds rapport and trust, an important step toward closing sales and building long-term customer relationships. Listening, learning, and empathizing are important first steps, but more is needed. “If all you are is responsive and helpful, then all you are is an administrative assistant,” says the Salesforce sales executive.
Salesforce’s cloud-based “Customer Success Platform” provides a wide array of customer relationship management tools that help its customers “supercharge their sales.”
So the next important step is to offer solutions —to show how Salesforce’s cloud-based solutions will help clients make their sales forces more effective and productive in connecting with and selling to customers. Salesforce believes that the best way to offer solutions is by telling good stories that highlight other customers’ successes with its products. “Storytelling is very, very important,” says Salesforce’s sales productivity manager. “It can be the foundation of things like the corporate pitch and your interactions with your customers and prospects.” When it comes to handling objections—such as “I don’t trust putting our data in the cloud,” “My current system is working fine,” or “It costs too much”—Salesforce tells its salespeople that stories can be the most powerful tools they have. “When faced with objections, we always relate it back to a customer story,” says a Salesforce marketing manager. “We’re not the hero in our customer’s stories,” says another manager. “It’s how the customer succeeded, not how we saved them.”
When it comes to competitors, Salesforce’s salespeople are ferocious. But Salesforce reps are trained to take the high road—to sell Salesforce’s strengths, not competitors’ weaknesses. “Internally, we have these posters: Crush Microsoft and Obliterate Oracle,” says the Salesforce marketing manager. But, he adds, “when you go out to your customers, you have to be careful that you’re guiding them and not just stepping on Microsoft. Even though we all want to.”
Thus, effective professional selling is about much more than glad-handing and back-slapping on the one hand or plying high-tech CRM tools and data analytics on the other. Even though Salesforce boasts the best sales and customer connection tools in the business, backed by big data and combined with plenty of new-school techniques, its sales reps stay focused on old-school selling principles. At Salesforce—or anywhere else—good selling starts with the fundamentals of engaging and listening to customers, understanding and empathizing with their problems, and building relationships by offering meaningful solutions for mutual gain. That’s how you build an incredibly successful sales force and Salesforce.
IN THIS CHAPTER , we examine two more promotion mix tools: personal selling and sales promotion . Personal selling consists of interpersonal interactions with customers and prospects to make sales and maintain customer relationships. Sales promotion involves using short-term incentives to encourage customer purchasing, reseller support, and sales force efforts.