Reinventing & Rethinking...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Mon, Aug 20, 2012

Rolling Stones & Sales

Who's the Best?

Lots of interesting comments from my last blog on the Rolling Stones.  Everything from “You’re showing your age”, to “How can you put the Stones ahead of the Beatles…Bruce…Zeppelin…Hendrix…Black Eyed Peas...and so on?”   Since I wanted to get everyone thinking about how to keep themselves and their sales personas young, it looks like from all of the emails that I received that I hit a cord.   Sometime this fall, I’ll follow up with my favorite/most successful individual artist.   Someone who, like the Stones, is highly successful, always on the edge and keeps reinventing themselves...but is much younger.

Reinventing Marketing & Sales-Is Marketing Dead?

I was talking with a beach buddy of mine the other day about this reinventing thing.  An accomplished marketing guy, an entrepreneur who began his own successful market research firm after working with the big boys in NYC and a deep-thinking kind of guy, he and I got into a discussion about today's rapidly changing world of marketing today.   Bottom line of that heady discussion as I conducted field research on a fantastic and cloudless beach day was that clearly, the world of marketing is at the forefront of reinvention, innovation and pretty much rethinking all of the rules.  Is marketing dead like last week’s Harvard Business Review suggests?  Absolutely not, since, as salesguys we always are in desperate need of fresh leads, we need a brand behind us, and quite frankly we’re totally helpless without the right kind of sales tools-all the primary responsibilities of Marketing. Marketing and Sales

As a result, the conclusion of my field research on the beach last week ended in my takeaway that marketing is more vibrant and even more enlivened today than it has been since the early days of TV, focus groups and consumer polls, largely due to the fact that everything is in flux and most of the old rules have been trashed.  

Relationship Selling is Dead...

This, of course, got me to thinking for the rest of last week about equally vibrant changes in the new world of Sales.  Maybe not as visible as marketing’s use of online apps and Twitter feeds, but the world of Sales has been going through a dynamic shift.  If Sales 1.0 was relationship selling, which truly is largely dead today, then the still unfolding world of Sales 2.0 is about Solution Selling, Process Management, highly integrated CRM, metrics, equations and mobile technology.  So, in the spirit of reinventing and rethinking, the question is what’s next?  As a firm, we’re deeply rooted in the strategies, tactics and techy tools of Sales 2.0.  We not only drink that Kool-Aid, we stir it up, and in many cases, create entirely new flavors.  We love drawing double helixed sales funnels and taking out our calculators to figure out the waterfall math, but what if there were to be a giant next step not in the evolution of sales, but in the total reinventing of sales?  BTW, Gartner projects that by 2020, 85% of all B2B transactions will occur without talking to a human.  What's that going to look like for you 8 years from now?

Sales 3.0...maybe

Solution SalesA step past process and equations?  What about a Sales 3.0 kind of space in some new fold in the sales cosmos in which we as salespeople didn’t actually try to sell our prospects?  Yea, I know that that’s really stupid, since, after all, I’m a salesguy.  But, that’s my point.  Since my prospects and existing customers already know that I’m ultimately going to try to sell them something, why not try to get way in front of today's thinking about assessing an already known business need and actually discover with them a new opportunity to improve their business?  And, I could somewhat easily do that if I were regarded as a consistent trusted business advisor to them. 

If I were a true trusted advisor, and my predominant skills set were my overall business management experience, my financial acumen and my ability to facilitate process, people and products between my company and the senior management of my customers, then I would discover business opportunities that were mutually important to both of us at a time before there was an actual need.          

Trusted advisor in salesIn today’s 2.0 world of highly measured process steps, metrics and technology, my job is to sell my prospects something more efficiently and effectively than anyone else.   And that’s a good thing…from my side of the table.  But from the customer or prospect's side of the table, isn’t my real job as a "Trusted Advisor" to make sure that whatever I am selling them or advising them on results in higher revenue and higher EBITDA in a relatively short term?  So, what if my job was not to sell, but to advise, to become part of their business strategy, and all the time keep a focused eye to the fact that at the end game, I need to bring home the bacon.

I need to get back to the beach this afternoon, do some more field research and think through this some more because once Labor Day comes, I’m back at it at full speed with overbooked schedules and 18 hour days.  In the meantime, maybe you can give me your own thoughts on any of the following:

  • How will your own sales process change over the next couple of years?
  • What do you think about the Gartner 2020 forecast?
  • What sales technology tools are you using today to become more effective?

 

Good Selling!

Jack
Head Coach
Linked In and Sales

Sales Management Boot CampIn our Sales Management Boot Camp, we provide the opportunity to discuss and learn about the dramatic changes in sales management as a professionin while also providing you with specific, hands-on answers to the question: “What can I do to dramatically impact our revenue in Q4 and 2013?”. 
For the details on this September 30th-October 2nd two and a half day Boot Camp and how we believe that you can attend for almost nothing, just click HERE,

 

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales, sales management, sales management effectiveness, sales plan process, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales planning, sales tools, selling, sales management training, selling skills, sales optomization, Sales quota, sales training, sales plans