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.
