Rapid advancements in technology have created opportunities to reach more people in more ways than ever before. The (old) model required that those wanting to learn had to travel to the expert, or teacher, to acquire the knowledge. Today, it is possible to access those same experts online, via elearning or distance learning. But what is the learning experience like? What are we teaching, and what does the student (or executive) need to learn?

Skills, Knowledge and Behavior Modification
Imagine that you wanted to build something with which you had no experience. Say…a gazebo. In scenario 1, you buy a book, follow the plans and use your best efforts to build it. In scenario 2, you watch an online video series where you’re shown how to make each cut and how to use each tool. In scenario 3, you have an experienced carpenter with you and a few others who want to learn, and the carpenter shows each of you how to do each step and explain why to each question you ask.

Which scenario would give you the best learning experience, the most encouragement and instill the skills most permanently? Granted, different people learn in different ways, but for most people, you can’t beat the skills that can be permanently instilled through personal instruction. You can acquire knowledge online. But acquiring the skills, experience and confidence needed to modify your behavior is best done in a classroom setting.

At the CustomerCentric Selling® 3 1/2 day workshops, attendees participate in numerous role-plays with coaches who have the experience to transfer the knowledge to a real-world situation. Further, attendees benefit greatly from the interaction they have with one another, finding comfort in the fact that others face similar problems and working together to find new skills and approaches that will help them all when they return to their jobs. You just can’treplace this online.

The goal of our clients is not to just to teach skills to their sales reps. It’s to make lasting changes to behavior, so that the organization can embrace and follow a process that is repeatable and scalable. I believe that this is also the need of most organizations. While elearning and online tools can be very valuable as a refresher and in reinforcing the behavior, it cannot replace the benefits of a classroom experience.

At CustomerCentric Selling®, we will continue to invest in our wonderful business partners and building that network of expertise, as we believe that this is the best way to help our clients achieve lasting change and realize the benefits of sales improvement that they are looking for.

Over the years, I’ve been on the recipient end of many a request for proposal (RFP).  Like many sales professionals, early in my career this created excitement and a flurry of activity on my part, caused late nights, missed dinners and visions of endless revenue.  I learned, as many have, that when an RFP is distributed, it’s sent to many possible suppliers.  By definition, the odds of any one firm winning are not great, unless that firm has stacked the odds in their favor.

That was an important lesson.  Today when I receive an RFP I still respond, only not with a proposal. I follow a process destined to obtain access to the executives involved with the decision so that I can understand the problem they are trying to solve.  This allows me to probe deeper into the root causes, with the hope that I can help the executives more fully understand the problem, its impact and its urgency. Naturally I’d like to bias this understanding toward the solution I hope to ultimately propose, but only if I can do so honestly and with integrity.

Of course this is an approach that we teach in the CustomerCentric Selling workshop.  Even though I’m happy that I learned this lesson early in my career, I’m surprised at how many people haven’t, and find themselves in constant response mode, but still with a low batting average.  In business, it’s important to try and stack the odds in your favor as much as possible, and if you can’t use the RFP process to re-engineer the buying process, your odds are improved if you decline to respond and focus your energies on more promising opportunities.

Guest Post by John Holland, Co-Founder & Co-Author, CustomerCentric Selling

Anyone willing to have compensation dependent upon delivering top line revenue better be able to withstand pressure. Not conveying that pressure to buyers can be difficult.

Most vendors apply pressure at the end rather than the beginning of the sales pipeline. Sellers have wide latitude in entering new opportunities into their sales funnels and are expected to enter a steady stream of new opportunities every month. Sales managers get a sense for the quantity of new activities, usually with little concern about quality. Their focus is further downstream on what they hope are closable opportunities to make the forecast.

According to CSO insights, over 90% of opportunities fail to close as forecast (they don’t close or close for different amounts or different dates). That statistic points out a need for managers to spend more time as deals enter the pipeline. New entries should meet defined minimum qualification standards and progress should be quantifiable as sales cycles move ahead. Consider the implication on cost of sales if quality control at the beginning of the pipeline were enforced.

Expecting sellers to close unqualified transactions in a given month is a recipe for disaster. In pipeline management and forecasting, bad news early is good news. When was the last time you heard a sales manager refuse to allow a new opportunity into the funnel because it didn’t meet muster? The CSO statistic will continue to be an issue for companies that fail to scrub pipelines early and on an ongoing basis.

There were many reasons that I joined CustomerCentric Selling® as CEO, and one of them was because, like many of you, I was influenced by Mike Bosworth’s work in the ‘9o’s when he wrote Solution Selling, and later when he evolved his thinking and concepts into even more workable concepts with CustomerCentric Selling®. I thought it would make for informative reading if I invited Mike to a Q&A session for this blog post.

Tim: Mike, in a recent post, I talked about the changing role of the VP of Sales and a need for process management. Given your insights, I wanted to dig into this deeper with you and ask a few questions that might be interesting to our readers.

Mike: Fire away.

Tim: OK, here goes…

Q – How do you see the challenges faced by a typical VP of Sales today vs. 10 years ago?

10 years ago, many VP’s of Sales were in a different job than that of the VP Sales of 2008. 10 years ago, many were doing much more active closing for their reps. Their sellers we more “tree shakers” and when something looked good, the sales managers did the real selling. Today, the skills of the typical enterprise salesrep are higher. They have to be. The buyer learns about products and companies from the website. Today’s seller has to be ready to converse about the buyers potential use of his offering to achieve specific goals and solve specific problems. Today, due to the amount of specificity needed when conversing
with prospects, sales managers and the VP Sales stay away until really needed, probably at the very end, if at all.

Q – What do you think the challenges will be like for the VP of Sales 10 years from now?

10 years from now, I believe the VP Sales and VP marketing jobs will be combined into the “VP of Customer Experience” as a functional title. Even in large, enterprise solution products and services buyers will be getting much more of their buying processes facilitated by technology. By intelligent websites. Websites that contain the ability to “converse” with buyers about their situations, their current reality, potential uses of their offering to help the buyer achieve relevant goals, solve relevant problems and satisfy relevant needs. This means organizations will be forced to create and institutionalize best practice buyer oriented messaging.

Q – Will the VP of Sales need new/different skills in the future in order to be successful? If so, what are they?

The primary one I can think of now is making much better use of technology to facilitate the customer experience through salespeople when necessary. The VP Sales will own the customer experience. To quote the American Marketing Association, “The conversations field salespeople or channel partners have with prospects and customers may be the last bastion of competitive differentiation in today’s rapidly commoditizing markets.” We will have to add the “conversations customers have with websites” to the mix of total customer experience.

Q – What are the market conditions that are driving these changes?

Technology improvements will continue to seed increase in Internet user experience for the entire market. The necessity to integrate Marketing with Sales with technology to focus on the total customer experience of the Internet savvy buyer.

Q – Finally, what impact does this have on sales reps who report to the VP of Sales?

The salesreps of the future who sell really big deals will be similar to today’s superstars, the 13% who bring in 87% of the revenue. I believe they will in in place in similar numbers as today. Many of the remaining 87% will be replaced by intelligent websites.