> SALES PITCH And there are some wonderful pieces of software out there that
help salespeople do everything from researching a customer, to find- ing sales leads, to building a personal network, to managing their sales opportunities, to keeping an eye on their pipeline. Whatever a salesperson has to do – other than face-to-face or telephone-to-tele- phone contact – can now be done through technology. Of course, it’s a risk as well as a potential asset because we’re
finding that some salespeople overuse technology and then miss the whole idea of establishing relationships and having live discus- sions. But those salespeople who understand balance and how to use the tools have really been able to be more effective and effi- cient.
3 Social media in the mainstream Social media is a part of all this. There’s a big debate going on now among the pundits and the purported experts in the sales effec- tiveness business about whether spending time on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in B2B sales really yields any measurable rewards. Some argue that salespeople who are not adept at using those
social media will fall by the wayside. Others say it’s not really that important at all – you should spend 3–5pc of your time experiment- ing andmaking contacts there, but spend the rest of your time doing the things that have been proven to work better or more effectively and efficiently. Some say it’s valuable for certain industries and certain kinds of sales jobs, while it isn’t for others. Personally, I fall into the last bracket. We have clients who don’t
use social media at all – it’s just not done in their industry. If the sales team spent time on it they would be sacrificing a good por- tion of their working week on non-productive activities. In other sectors a salesperson just isn’t a player if they’re not into building their LinkedIn network, monitoring Twitter or tweeting themselves. There’s no magic formula or guide to say that every salesperson
should be spending x amount of time on social media. You really have to take a look at the most important factor, which is how your buyers need to be communicated with. If they need to be com- municated with through your Facebook page, if they monitor Twitter constantly or they want to be contacted through LinkedIn and they want to be networking, well you better be there. If they aren’t, your job is not to get them educated on social media, your job is to sell to them!
4 A surge in coaching In the past, coaching was one of the first items stripped from the
sales training budgets. When I was a sales trainer and segmented engagements into pre-training, sales training and coaching at the back end, potential customers would often say they didn’t need the pre-training or the coaching work, just do the training and it will be half the cost. At ES Research, we’ve just completed in-depth interviews with
39 sales training companies and we’ve found that every one of them is beefing up its coaching offerings and there are new
60 Marketing Age Volume 5 Issue 1 2011
entrants appearing in the industry who do nothing but coach. This is good news, because when we in the research business
look at sales effectiveness we know, and have always known, how important coaching is. But somehow we couldn’t shake sense into sales training buyers and we couldn’t convince sales training providers that they should walk away if the buyers wouldn’t invest in the coaching component. We’re finding now that both sides of the equation are willing to consider coaching more seriously and engage in ongoing coaching programmes.
5 Compelling answers to how you are different It is the job of buyers to try to remove any differences between sell- ing companies and their competitors so their customers can ulti- mately buy on price and terms, assuming that the minimum spec- ifications and requirements are met. Selling companies need to be able to sell on something other
than how low they can price their products and services and to do this they need to be able to articulate very clearly how they are dif- ferent in terms of value they can deliver to that customer. If I’m selling Dell computers to a business manager and I’m com-
peting against a guy who’s selling HP computers and those comput- ers are listing at the same price, I have to be very clear as to why Dell is a better choice. I can’t fall back on speeds and processing power and number of slots in the back, because that is not what ultimately will enable me to not only win, but to not be commoditised. So I have to be able to talk about the business value of my prod-
uct or service and how I am uniquely qualified to deliver that. Assuming that that business value aligns with what my customer is trying to achieve and I can do that in a credible way, then I have competitive advantage. It’s important to remember that if a customer isn’t asking you
‘How are you different?’, they are thinking it. We’re now seeing an emergence of sales training companies
that are stressing messaging. There are a number of companies now specialising in working with sales and marketing teams to come up with differentiated value messages and to then enable salespeople to deliver those messages to the key stakeholders in their customer organisations. For companies selling in the B2B space, it’s important to take a
good objective look at all five of these trends and to ask three questions. What does my market demand in terms of me coming up to speed and having a high degree of efficacy in these five areas? How well do I do in the five areas? If there’s a gap, what am I going to do to close it and when am I going to do it?
Dave Stein is founder and CEO of ES Research.
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