Innovative use of technology is changing the way top salespeople work in today's information-rich marketplace
By John Tanner and Michael Ahearne
Only one competitive differentiator really matters for salespeople—how well they meet their customers' needs and wants. Do this well and the job will be rewarded with closed sales, surpassed quotes and maybe even an all expense-paid trip to Bermuda.
Sounds simple, yes, but sales reps face a symphony of sources from which to fine-tune their messages. Overwhelming, seemingly endless amounts of information exist on customers, competitors and industries. In the online world, no detail is too small to escape the notice of hard working search engines. So sales reps need to make sense of the noise or else prepare to move on to a less-demanding profession.
Whether it's innovative use of Web 2.0 technologies like social networks that let them swap ideas with colleagues, or business-intelligence analytics that turn up fresh perspectives on customers, salespeople are enlisting technology to find what’s of value. In the best cases, they're not only honing their competitive edge but also taking steps to create the consistent experience that customers crave.
The Changing Shape of Sales
Companies are looking for more productivity than ever from salespeople. In a study by Accenture, 62 percent of executives ranked sales as one of the three most important functions in their companies (see chart, “Sales is Critical to the Organization”). Another 43 percent named customer service and support. While identifying the functions as valuable, executives also saw room for improvement: Only 25 percent gave the two functions a high rating.
Sales is Critical to the Organization...
Executives see sales as one of the three most important functions in the organization, yet only 25 percent of respondents rated the performance of sales as “high." - Accenture, 2006 High-Performance Workforce Survey
What are sales organizations doing to boost their successes? For one thing, they're changing shape to suit the hotly competitive global economy. They've switched to team-based selling, for example, to give clients better, more thorough service. Recent advances in CRM and Web-based collaboration software for large and midsized companies have made it easier for sales to work more smoothly with customer service and support teams.
For another, top salespeople are altering the buying conversation to better match today’s more savvy buyers. Customers and prospects are researching organizations, reading blogs, and seeing what competitors and customers have to say about companies long before they schedule an initial sales meeting. While intimidating at first, the truth is that informed customers lay the groundwork for sales reps to more easily advance their relationships—if they engage in a real value-added dialog instead of just repeating functions and specifications from the sales sheet.
Indeed, eliminating the need to describe product basics has opened the door to more substantive discussions, much of which is fostered by technology. The frequency of interaction has skyrocketed as well, due to online chat and messaging essential tools in the always-on environment.
John Tanner, Professor of Marketing,
Baylor University
Meanwhile, good sales reps are becoming more innovative at integrating customer insights from multiple sources, both inside and outside their organizations. They're also mastering multiple channels of engagement, aiming to be comfortable in any channel the customer chooses.
The Shift to Solution Selling
While some companies use technology to manage raw sales activity—for example, monitoring whether salespeople make their calls—others focused on high value, high margin sales take a more profitable route. The trend is clear: As companies move order-taking toward lower cost channels like the Internet, sales is morphing into an advocacy role. As a result, companies are working to beef up their sales reps' business acumen.
“More salespeople are becoming advocates for their customers, and that's how salespeople add and justify their value,” says John Tanner, professor of marketing at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. That's changing the nature of selling, he says. “Companies are spending a lot of training dollars on general business training such as how to understand capital budgeting procedures so salespeople can talk the language of senior executives.”
Pharmaceutical companies, for example, typically rely on well-defined sales campaigns, adhering to careful calling schedules and scripts. Now, they're using mobile technology to test different call strategies and determine which works best, says Tanner.
When a doctor reports that a drug induces drowsiness as a side effect, the sales rep on call can record the objection with a few clicks on a PDA or laptop, “noting which doctor objected and what the objection was—without ever having to take a note,” says Tanner. And instead of fumbling in a brief case for a hard copy, the rep can pull up a clinical trial electronic record to address the doctor's concerns by putting one anecdotal incident into a context of a field trial of thousands of patients. Meanwhile, the reps and their companies have “significantly more information to use to influence sales strategy,” says Tanner.
New Skills, New Opportunities
With the changed job description comes the requirement for a different set of skills. Sales managers these days need to master business intelligence analytics, for example. Salespeople rely to a greater degree than ever before on financial acumen and technology expertise. “We're asking different things of them than we used to,” points out Tanner.
Make no mistake: The shift is putting a squeeze on the profession. A 2007 talent shortage survey by employment services firm Manpower found sales representative the hardest job to fill in the U.S. In addition, Accenture found reluctance among the heads of functions like sales be more involved in so-called “people” issues such as training (see chart, “Do Sales Managers Lack People Skills?”). Only 34 percent of respondents identified the head of sales—the most critical workforce among survey respondents—as highly involved in human-capital management issues.
Do Sales Managers Lack People Skills?
Surveyed executives believe relatively few sales leaders are highly involved in training programs. Sales technologies can help salespeople refine their skill sets. But there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for everyone. There are subtleties to the ways in which salespeople use and benefit from technology, advises University of Houston marketing professor Mike Ahearne, who has studied the impact of technology on sales.
Mike Ahearne, Executive Director, Sales Excellence Institute
Using CRM software that can identify the most promising prospects, for example, is a useful strategy among novice sales professionals, points out Ahearne, who heads up the university's Sales Excellence Institute. But among experienced business-to-business sales reps who have, say, been servicing territories with 100 customers for 15 years, the scenario may be different. They have the depth of knowledge and the familiarity with nuance to make better predictions on their own.
Ahearne’s research spotted differences among the way that industries put sales technology to use. While sales reps in some sectors enlist technology to make more calls, he says, others look to make more substantive gains with fewer prospects. In the consumer packaged goods sector, for example, innovative sales reps have used business analytics successfully to add to the richness of data about a relatively small number of accounts. Says Ahearne: “It's not about frequency of calls, but quality of calls.”
Quality over quantity has indeed become sales reps' credo, and technology is now an innovative and critical differentiator. Whether it's Web 2.0 technologies that let salespeople collaborate with one another, or sifting through business-intelligence analytics for fresh perspectives, technology is the new competitive edge. As John Tanner puts it, “The organizations that are thriving are the ones who use technology to empower salespeople to make them more successful.”
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About the authors
John Tanner is professor of marketing at Baylor University. His research focuses on CRM and buyer behavior, and sales and sales management.
Michael Ahearne is associate professor of marketing at the University of Houston and executive director of its Sales Excellence Institute. He is co-author of Selling Today.