Almost inevitably ‘no’ is the answer to the question ‘Are two head better than one?’ when talking about sales headcount… especially in light of recent evidence from consultants IDC showing that, on average today, between 1.5 -2.2 salespeople are employed to deliver the same results that could be achieved with one fully effective salesperson, is it any wonder that CEOs (chief executive officers) are looking at the sales function with ever-increasing interest.

So what’s gone wrong?

If you type ‘selling’ into Google you will receive some 470 million responses, each one purporting that they have the magic elixir (hopefully not the ModernSelling.com search returns! – Ed) that will make you more money.  Make what you will of this, but to me it says that the very term selling has become a problem today – what does it mean, what is involved in selling, which approach is the ‘right one’.

Is it any wonder with so many different views that salespeople get confused about their role. Indeed the very mystique surrounding selling is often its downfall.

Logical

Selling is and always has been a very logical, structured profession which has become clouded and confused over time by the superfluity of so-called sales approaches, systems, methodologies and techniques. Sales effectiveness is a way of cutting through this hyperbole and dragging the sales profession back to the raw, undeniable truth that is selling.

Selling: based on trust.

Sitting underneath the practice of selling are all of the technical and functional elements that together deliver your promise. This supporting activity has been confused in the recent past with selling. Wrong, this is simply putting together the jigsaw of tangible deliverables that support and underpin the act of selling.  

Mutual respect

Selling itself is a trust-based activity. Buyer and seller, through a relationship of mutual respect and trust, develop competitive advantage, differentiation, brand improvement; revenue and EBIT (earnings before interest and tax – similar to operating profit) improvement for the buyer’s business, with the seller acting in the role of researcher and innovator. This is when selling really starts to become effective.

So why has the ‘selling’ community got so confused?

Because to achieve the simple act of effective selling requires a complex support infrastructure geared up to focus all the seller’s resources onto each customer individually. Many organisations today still have structures based on selling as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Disconnects between sales and marketing

These structures drive disconnects between sales and marketing leading to a dilution of value for buyers. Indeed, when IDC asked ‘On a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is least effective and 100 is most effective, indicate how effective marketing is at optimising sales’ efficiency and effectiveness in 2006?’, marketing award themselves 66.1 (a C-) and sales awarded marketing 57 (a D+).  

Why did this happen? It started in the industrial revolution, when the old personal and local contacts between buyer and seller – where the seller knew the buyer and understood his needs – broke down in the name of efficiency and mass production. During this era, which lasted until the advent of the internet, sellers ‘got away with’ fobbing off ‘the consumer’ with impersonal, one-size-fits-all offerings, caring little about the value each offering created for the buyer and spending more time counting the mounting piles of cash within their organisation. (Some would say this is even more the case since the proliferation of IT, especially in financial services.)

Industrialisation drives down cost and...

Buyers no longer want what we offer

The result of this is the cause of the current challenges for sellers. Internally focussed, many of today’s sellers struggle to understand why buyers no longer want what they offer; why buyers are always squeezing their prices and making them work harder for every penny. The result for sales organisation’s is increasing cost of sale, reducing EBIT, pressure from every side on every department to drive out every possible cost. Yet, this approach alone is the path to failure.

Having driven out every cost, maximised every efficiency, just when Western organisations thought they were wresting back control from the buyers, along came a double whammy of global scale that has thrown a big spanner in the works of many organisations: the internet and the East.

The internet opened the eyes of buyers worldwide to what was available from anyone anywhere, enabling them to shop around for the cheapest of whatever they wanted, or to search out that unique item that really added value to their lifestyle or business. Witness the meteoric rise of specialist one-man bands offering services such as real ‘fish smoking’, rather than the injected flavour and artificially dyed colour of ‘smoked fish’ offered by the mass producers.  

... it's always cheaper in the East.

Changing world dynamics

The old systems of selling can no longer cope with these dramatic and swift changes in world dynamics. Neither is it always the case that the ‘customer knows best what they want’. Buyers are often just as confused as everyone else about what they need to increase their success. Now is the time for ‘selling’ once again to become a profession, where the buyer and seller work together in a relationship of mutual trust to deliver innovation and business success for each other.

Selling approaches from the 1980s and 1990s cannot deal with this level of complexity – or should it be with this level of simplicity!  

What do you need to do to become ‘sales effective’?

Selling is once again going back to its roots:

• understand your customers’ business problems better than they do;
• focus the resources at your disposal on the creation of business and personal innovation for your customers;
• ensure they understand ‘what’s in it for them’ or how your innovation will help them rise above the masses; and
• deliver what you promise, or more.