NeilWarren
Posts 645
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I’ve just posted the review of Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind – but do find the echoes from it to be truly astounding.
If you missed it, my introduction to Dan’s thinking came from the motivation angle, featured in this speech he gave in Oxford in the summer –
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html (20 mins - and probably the best 20 minutes you'll spend this year!).
The scary thing being, if he’s right, that probably 90% of all our UK sales jobs, at present, are set up wrong. We’re being pointed at the wrong goals, for the wrong reasons, and probably a high percentage of the wrong types of people are being recruited and trained to fulfil all those wrong jobs.
Quite simply, it just might not be a question of making the required number of telephone lifts, or physical meetings to hit the best “target” – if that target is, in fact, establishing ourselves as the “go-to-guys” and finding the maximum number of problems and issues that you can creatively solve for your existing customers and new prospects.
This has ramifications for the entire sales support industry too, as far as I can see, from recruiters, to trainers to motivators. And if you want to know whether this is “fantasy” rather than “fact”, I suggest you also have a think about the differences between “push” selling and marketing (make the calls, hit the numbers, scatter-gun marketing) and “pull” selling and marketing (build an influential network and get their support and interest in your ideas) as exampled in this post about a recent B2C “experiment” - TV & The Tabloids v T’internet - The "X" Factor.
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NeilWarren
Posts 645
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But it also gets a lot more “real world” than that, where I saw a post yesterday on a USA LinkedIn sales group a bit like our own - LinkedIn – ModernSelling.com Group from a chap called Bob Swartz, who is a Sales Executive of Sibco Building Products (and you don’t get more down to earth in a depressed economy than that) where, in response to a question about whether our glasses were half full or half empty, he said…
“I have had to get a bigger glass and it is getting fuller all the time! I have spent the last several months looking at me more as a brand. My sales have increased and my list of project contracts for next year that are signed exceed 2009's total project sales. I would like to thank all who are in this group, you are inspiring and supportive and for this I am forever grateful. Being in an industry where so many of my peers are down 20% or more for the year, the support that I have gained from this site has allowed me to grow my sales over 2008 and look forward to a possible record 2010!”
…which I personally found to be one of the most motivating posts I’d read (out of thousands).
I’m not saying that any and all sales skills, techniques and processes are now “dead” or even redundant. Quite the opposite, in fact, having looked quite closely at the various recruitment, assessment, training, incentive/motivation, process management and such like systems on offer. We still need elements of “hunter” and “farmer” mentalities, we still need professional assessments of vacancy types and finding people to match them, we still have to train the fundamental selling skills in the first place, from being professional on the phone to making a presentation (but we could do with some e-Sales training folks!), and of course it’s only right and proper that sales people should share in the financial rewards their success brings, one way or another.
However I don’t think we’re currently doing the best job of matching up all these tools to find, create, and motivate, round pegs in round holes. And getting it wrong is proving to be very, very expensive for UK PLC.
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