Over the last 10 years “Sales” has been renamed “Marketing” or “Business Development.” I recently heard about an organization calling their salespeople “Revenue Engineers.”
Baloney…
It is true that “sales” as a function has changed and some organizations have not recognized that yet. They are still sending their salespeople on what I call “Pitch and Prays” where the sales process is still just a numbers game and anything that moves gets pitched. Or even worse, they are asking their sales folks to makes hundreds of contacts through email or phone calls which is the equivalent of driving at night without lights. That leaves sales pros and customers describing those experiences in dirty words that would make George Carlin blush.
While we spend significant mental energy renaming sales functions, we aren’t supporting or developing sales leadership like we should. According the Harvard Business Review:
“To put a finer point on it, of the 479 U.S. business programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, only 101 have a sales curriculum, and a mere 15 offer either an MBA in sales or some sort of sales-oriented graduate curriculum. Sales may be vital to businesses, but of the 350,000 students a year who earn bachelor’s degrees in business from American universities, and the 170,000 who earn MBAs, only a tiny fraction have been taught anything about it.”
But, there are organizations that are starting to realign the value of salespeople with their customers. This is demonstrated when sales people focus on facilitating the purchase for a customer. Every organization has a different process for purchasing products or services and many of those processes can be difficult or time intensive. Successful salespeople are realizing this and creating value by navigating those processes with or even for potential customers by preparing documentation, gathering required information or even writing RFPs for prospective clients.
If you want to see this practice in action, visit an Ethan Allen retail location. Those folks are tremendous at facilitating customers’ purchases.
Most customers already have the relevant information about your product, your competitors’ products, pricing differences and has probably called a colleague or two before you get to actually engage them. You need to add real value to your sales process by thinking about how you can facilitate purchases more than selling something.
The difference in winning new business can be as much about “how” the sales process works and the customer’s experience buying from your salespeople. This is especially true in highly competitive markets or in commoditized products.
When an organization does not recognize and act on this shift in a sales function’s value to their customers, there may be a very dirty word used to describe their performance- failing.
Teaching Sales– Harvard Business Review