Are Your Salespeople Stupid?

Scott Santucci

Who would you envision your company promoting your SME's?

Don -

Thanks a lot for your comments.

Considering the forum, I don't this its appropriate for me to comment on details about Unisys. However, the topic you raise is a very interesting one and one that most companies are struggling with today. What is the optimum balance between subject-matter knowledge and feet on the street? (We’ll save the conversation about what constitutes a subject-matter expert for later – because this is a big open debate too).

Based on your past experiences, what actions do you think a company should take to convert their Subject Matter Experts into “rock stars” so that it’s about “who they are, not what they know”. Obviously, those experts would need an identity, or a personal brand. Who should be responsible for promoting it?

I agree with the premise that sales executives should have some well known commodity to bring in to help validate all they have said. In some companies, there are too few people with that skill set and sales efforts are held hostage to the schedules of a handful of executives. At the other extreme, I’ve seen companies with too many “subject matter experts” and this creates a very expensive sales model, and a big account management burden by sales people (image trying to get 4 different “experts” to talk at a high level where their fields intersect. It’s not easy). I’ve also seen scenarios where “rock star” subject-matter experts believe THEY are the ones with the relationships with the customer and say things which diminish the perceived power of the sales executive (power buys from power, right?) and unknowingly undermine the selling process.

From your perspective, what would this look like? Who would help these experts become better known in their fields? What tasks would you take off of their plates to allow them more time to be “rock stars?”

The reason I ask is that executives are worried about these kinds of tradeoffs. You and I both know they don’t factor in the realities of selling into their evaluations, so if we want things to change, we need to provide them some rationale as to how to value the work load of a particular role and evaluate the trade offs of activities that will and will not be performed.

Scott Santucci
BluePrint Marketing
www.blueprintmarketing.com

Scott Santucci

A very ecologicial perspective you have

Marshall - thanks for your comments. I am glad you like the piece.

It’s very refreshing to read about your perspective. Your right - a B2B selling environment behaves much more like a biological ecosystem rather than a schematic that operates to specification.

Today, far too many go-to-market models have their legacy underpinning in product centric behavior. As an example, I know of many companies who have made strong commitments to Wall Street that they will be converting their business models to be more customer centric or account based. However, their marketing groups still have "product marketing" functions and their corporate P&L's are still grouped by capability.

In reality, most actions by companies to be "customer-centric" are really incremental improvements on an inwardly focused design point. It is completely unrealistic to expect an individual sales person or service representative to overcome all of the back office neglect of the customers perspective. Targeted account programs, customer management software, executive selling skill courses - these are all just "lipstick on a pig" without some way to make sure all of the client facing efforts are coordinated and rationalized with actually adding value!!

Wow, I sure got out my soapbox there, didn’t I?

Scott Santucci

Scott Santucci

The question of balance

Bill - wow. What great comments. I think you’re focusing in on one of the most poorly understood issues facing B2B businesses - what is value and how you communicate it. From my point of view, "keep it simple" is only an ingredient. How this very straightforward directive gets manifested in a corporation creates huge problems.

Today, most of the responsibility to develop the content which ultimately fuels the valuable conversations you have with your customers is on the backs of marketing professionals. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of them interpret “keep it simple” as being - create one-pagers. Little critical thought is given to what content should be developed – let alone how to structure or design information so that it can be easily understood and transmitted.

As a result, you are left with a mountain of materials that are so sanitized, they sound just like what you competitors say, and offer you no real insight (if you can find them in the first place, but that another issue entirely).

The real issue here is that content should not be designed to be easy for marketing to use, or simple for sales to use - but rater SIMPLE FOR THE CUSTOMER TO UNDERSTAND.

Mark Twain once said, "If I had more time, I would have written you a longer letter". The point here is that making things simple for customers is not an easy endeavor. Creating the right value communications model requires an accurate customer model; a process which cuts across sales, marketing, and solutions; and a well thought out information architecture to allow sales people to make complex concepts simple for customers.

Scott Santucci

Why do we engage with sales people to begin with?

Bob –

As always, you have a real knack to isolate some key points.

Personally, I think the CRM community would be a lot better off if we were to organize our points of view into business models. CRM is a very different animal from a B2C company like Starbucks than it is for a B2B company like IBM. The “Customer” is different, the “Relationship” is different, and the “Management” is different. Considering my expertise is in B2B, I think there are also two distinct categories of B2B selling as well. These two are:

1) The corporate commodity – something where the customer has the same or more information about the product, service or solution as the vendor, but there are business reasons to have a point of contact with a given company. Consider Nabisco. They have sales teams who work with grocery chains. Everyone knows what a Nutter Butter tastes like and how to eat one. However, sales people do provide value in working out shipping terms, setting up displays, etc.

2) Solving a problem –a customer has a particular problem where the vendors have more knowledge than they do. In this case, the successful sales person takes on a more consultative role and actually helps the customer figure why they are having a problem and share best practices as to how to solve that issue. A good example would be selling a CRM system. People with sales forces rarely have the opportunity to think deeply about all of the little things (and if they do, don’t have the data points from other accounts like a vendor does) that go into making their sales teams more effective. In this case, the vendor has a lot more knowledge than their customers do.

My point here is that we cannot necessarily use our experiences of working with a sales person as a barometer for what should be expected from our sales people.

At the end of the day, of course you are right – it really is about how they sales person engages with you. But, the real question is – “why are you engaging with a sales person in the first place?”

If you are in B2B scenario one (you know as much or more as the vendor) then a sales person who is trying to help diagnose your current state, is really going to waste your time and “piss you off”.

Conversely, if you know something is wrong in your organization and just can’t put your finger on what it is, or how to fix it – a sales person who shares details about their approach is going to be equally off-putting.

I believe that the role of a sales person is an integral part of an overall CRM strategy, and one that is rarely looked at from the point of view of the customer. There is a reason most corporations today are aggressively pursing procurement strategies that reduce the access their executives have to vendor sales people. In most cases, these companies have concluded that dealing with sales people provides THEM with no value. B2B vendors need to really understand the value that their customers perceive from both their capabilities and their go-to-market model if they want to develop the right strategies to combat commoditization pressures.

Scott Santucci