Customer-Centric Salespeople Are Four Times More Effective

That's the claim in a recent white paper.

The authors claim that sales professionals fall into two categories, eagles and journeypeople.

According to them, most sales organizations are made up mainly of journeypeople. They rely on their knowledge of the company and its offerings in sales calls. They are most comfortable talking about their company's capabilities and products. They make lots of statements about their products and services, in hopes that something will resonate with the buyer. In general, journeypeople see their jobs as a facilitator of transactions between their company and its customers.

Eagles, on the other hand, make up less than 20 percent of most sales teams but account for the bulk of sales revenues, in some cases more than 80 percent. What makes eagles so much more effective is their focus on the customer and the customer's business issues. In general, eagles see their job as capturing pertinent customer information, diagnosing customer issues, and then prescribing the most suitable solutions.

As someone who has sold and managed a nationwide sales team I am not surprised by this position. And, I believe their claim that eagles account for up to 4 times more sales. The question is, why haven't more sales leaders figured this out and why aren't they doing more about it?

In my experience there are two primary reasons. One, most sales organizations train their sales teams to sell products and do very little to recruit and train sales people who can sell business solutions. The obvious reason for this is that most sales organizations are run by salespeople who were themselves journeypeople. The second reason is most sales people have very little business acumen outside of selling, that is to say, they have very little insight into the challenges that face their customers. Moreover, they do not have systematic ways to gain these insights. Most often, their insights come from marketing and marketing slants the information in their company's favor.

The authors of the paper believe that journeypeople can be taught to be eagles. They do bring some bias to the issues since they sell software to facilitate the process.

My personal experience says that the majority of journeypeople will not make the transition. If sales organizations are going to become customer-centric it is going to involve a transformation. Will the traditional sales process and people be replaced? Or will there be a metamorphosis?

I invited your comments and love to here about your experiences.