Every organization depends on sales. Strategic and product development teams can come up with a phenomenal product, marketing can research the market, define the ICP (ideal customer profile), create a buying persona (buying persona), create phenomenal marketing messages and campaigns, but if sales fail, all of previous falls flat.
And in the context of sales, today many are talking about the introduction of a "system" for sales development, and most often they mean some software (CRM), some tools for generating leads (most often they do nothing but the so-called scraping of email addresses of certain people in certain companies in accordance with the ICP), the automation of mail campaigns and the definition of the sales process. It is often claimed that these systems are "guaranteed" to work. I believe that they contribute a certain percentage, because we all know that quantity is important, at the entrance to the sales funnel, to a certain extent, but not at the expense of quality.
So where do these systems break?
From my, now I can say, decades of experience working in sales and with sales teams, I can name several reasons for the "system" to break:
First contact (outreach):
- If the first contact with the customer is automated, it usually means that the maximum personalization is reflected in the fact that the system has correctly addressed the person receiving the email by name. The rest of the message is usually generic, overpromises and always assumes a "problem" that it is "guaranteed" to be solved. If people were ready solve their problems by someone telling them they have one, many more people would go to psychotherapy in time, which is not the case.
- If the first contact is via a phone call, most of the time those calls end because pitching the product/service started too early.
Sales process:
- In most cases "self-centered": tailored to the selling organization, not the customer. Often focused on fulfilling internal administrative requirements and rarely focused on the customer and aligning to their buying process.
- Many professional salespeople focus exclusively on decision makers, and that path can be difficult and often takes longer.
- The process is the same regardless of whether it is a transactional sale or a strategic one.
- Salespeople rarely leave the sales process even when there is no potential for cooperation. By doing so, they are just fulfilling an administrative request, have an “opportunity” in the funnel.
Product/service:
- In addition to starting the conversation about the product/service too early, assuming the need exists, sales professionals often play on the card of uniqueness, the advantages of the product/service compared to the competition. And what has no competition today and how much does your product/service really differ from the competition?
- Many say, "the customer is not interested in your product/service". That doesn't mean they don't care about what that product/service can do for them. What I see is that many sales professionals do not perform a basic calculation regarding the financial effects of the purchase for their customers, and then the sole focus is on the price.
Is it even possible to prevent the system from breaking and how?
As there are no 100% successful sales, there is no system that works in 100% of situations.
What minimizes the chances for the system to crack is building customer APPROACH.
Customers behave towards us based on what they have heard, seen or experienced during our interactions, much more than based on the functionality of the product/service.
Seeing, hearing, experiencing = perception. Perception builds attitudes: acceptance, indifference or resistance. Attitudes drive human behavior. So, with our behavior, we influence the perception of (potential) customers, so that perception is positive and results in behavior, i.e. buying.
APPROACH is how you communicate, how you treat and how you regard your customer at EVERY point of interaction.
The best sales results I achieved with my clients were when we firstly worked on defining the approach, i.e. on adapting/changing the behavior of sales professionals to be perceived as the most reliable supplier.
And of course, changes in behavior did not happen overnight. The first thing that happened was an internal need to change systems/work procedures, because it quickly became clear that they were not serving the customer. They do not serve salespeople either, because they often affect not the improvement, but the reduction of productivity.
Also, bearing in mind the considerable fluctuation in sales organizations, by building an approach to the customer, you get unique and recognizable user experience, regardless of who is the sales guy with whom your (potential) customer is cooperating.
In the end, with the constant support of introducing changes in the least painful way and the evolution of work procedures, i.e. system, better sales results were achieved.
If you don't want your sales team to be perceived as the predator in the image at the top of this article and you're not looking for a magician to fix things overnight, let's talk, it doesn't have a price tag on it…
Dragan Vukosavljević
Sales Development Consultant