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Thomas Watson, Sr., builder of IBM’s legendary sales force, became famous for the motto: Think. The subtext of this simple message? Before running off to do something, anything, take a moment to consider what you’re about to do—and why. Apple made hay with its celebrated campaign a few years ago featuring famous personalities (Einstein, the Dali Lama, Marilyn Monroe) with the simple admonition to Think Different. This paper, second in a two-part series on Sales 2.0, suggests you Think Again.
If you think you know sales, you likely are bringing to this topic a history and track record that has served you well. This paper attempts to offer the cautionary warning that what has worked in your past may not serve your current sales reps as well today, and could actually hurt their performance. The very notion of a “sales process” is incomplete, inaccurate, and obsolete even before becoming widely adopted. Why? Because it speaks to only half of what’s going on—there is also a buying process occurring (likely starting sooner). And there is process improvement that requires discipline, feedback, standards, and much more. These issues are addressed in the following pages, but there’s one topic that isn’t covered: CHANGE.
Even as you read this discussion of Sales 2.0 (S2.0), things are changing. Writing this paper is like trying to take a photograph of a very fast-moving race car while the camera morphs in our hands—everything is moving and morphing. Which is why everything you think you know about sales can quickly become wrong. The best you can do at this point is to use what you knew to anticipate what will be useful and appropriate going forward—and to recognize that even when you’re right, you will have to keep current, keep innovating, keep questioning.
And keep collaborating. Sales 1.0 was about lone wolves, product superiority, proven skills and making the number. Sales 2.0 is about leveraging teams and technology, total solutions and continuous improvement reflected in continuously improving results. Relationships will not be simply who’s in your contact database, but the quality and level of dialog your relationships enjoy. This has always been true, but “you” and “your” is not just the individual sales rep, but all the individuals and resources supporting the sales rep. It’s not even about your number (though there’ll be hell to pay if you and your team don’t make it). Sales is one functional area working with marketing, engineering, logistics, finance, support, and the rest of the company to hit this and next year’s revenue targets. And the year after that. S1.0 is built upon the classic military model: Command, Control, Conquer.
The S2.0 model, on the other hand, has a different foundation: Collaborate, Choreograph, Capture.
Capture wallet share. Capture customer loyalty. Capture the imagination of your buyers, your sales reps, your peers. Capture an idea.
Read fast. A lot will have changed by the time you finish this paper.
In Part 1 of this white paper we discussed the differences between Sales 1.0 (S1.0) and Sales 2.0 (S2.0). We also provided statistics on many of the business drivers underpinning the argument that a shift from the former to the latter is overdue. But what will the new sales workstyle look like? We noted that when we look at how salespeople perform today, we often see reps employing processes that may have served their predecessors (and managers) well in the 1980’s and 1990’s, but which do not fit today’s much more dynamic world. S2.0 is a process-oriented, technology based way of targeting prospects, developing interest, creating urgency, quantifying value, establishing competitive differentiation, and building loyalty. Descriptions of early S2.0 examples at various stages of the buy/sell cycle are presented below.
How We Got Here
It would be easy, perhaps even tempting, to be judgmental about the activity-driven, chaotic nature of most sales organizations today. However, these organizations and their processes have evolved over time, and like most evolutionary processes, they have kept what worked—or seemed to—and abandoned what didn’t.
Not so very long ago, companies like IBM, Xerox, NCR, and ADP trained America’s sales force. It was not unusual for a new hire to attend extended sales training boot camps for a month or longer.
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