 Some people have been foolish enough to wish me luck and ask me what they can do to help in the early days of CRMuse. Jim Dickie, partner with CSO Insights, was one of them. His punishment was to have to answer five questions about the state of sales management...
Jason Compton: What are chief sales officers (CSOs) going to look to do to outperform one another over the second half of this decade?
Jim Dickie: Most CSOs are realizing that in order to be competitive in the marketplace, it's not what they sell that really matters anymore, it's how. The product lifecycle has collapsed so much that if someone doesn't have a feature, function, or service today, they're going to have it tomorrow, so most product advantages are not sustainable.
What they can do for customers is be more responsive, add value, and have the people who work with them be a service link, and get that proposal out now instead of taking ten days—show that you're being more responsive, more professional, and you get points from buyers.
JC: How have the priorities of top sales executives changed of the past decade, when it comes to changing sales processes and introducing sales automation?
JD: In 1999, revenues were going up like a rocketship, [so they said] 'Sales effectiveness? What's that? We're selling like hotcakes.' But my favorite line about the period is "in a hurricane, even turkeys can fly," and in 2000-2001, things started to crater and the lot of those reps who were pretenders... their wings stopped flapping and they fell to the ground.
The result is a shift back to the late 80s and early 90s, where CSOs say they're going to put some religion back into sales. It's not going to be that they go to salespeople and tell them to think of being the CEO of their own business. If I have 100 reps, I'm going to have 100 reps doing one thing, not 100 reps doing 100 things.
There's a huge interest in process, because if I can get all the salespeople marching down the same road and it's the wrong road, it will come screaming out at us so we can fix the business. And now with Sarbanes-Oxley, the CEO and CFO need to sign off on what's happening, so they're going down to the VP of Sales' office and saying "You'd better be right." That is causing more rigor around process.
JC: With the dot-com boom having calmed down, what lasting impact has the Internet had on the sales world?
JD: The real, lasting impact for most of the companies we talk to is realizing that we have to be willing to sell the way customers want to buy. But we saw that while we could engage everybody and say, "Go to my website, it will take your order," websites don't go out and attract new customers.
JC: What's top on the chief sales officer's wish list in terms of personnel? What characterizes the ideal sales hire in 2005?
JD: The biggest shift we are seeing in a lot of companies is that they are going out to get someone with business knowledge about the area they are selling into. So if they sell financial software, they go get someone with accounting experience, or if they're in engineering they go get an EE grad who has been out making chips for years.
The Internet has taken all of the data knowledge out of the equation—if I just want speeds, feeds, specs, and prices, I can go online for that. GE Plastics has a site with 10,000 pages of product information on it, so I clearly do not need a sales rep to give me that. I can get it on my own, and in fact I probably will. But if I'm going to put a plastic part on my Mars rover, I need to know how it's going to work, and I need to find the right resource in the company to answer that question.
The sales rep has to be part of that value-add, part of the solution. Reps need to be less about "Let's play golf", so companies are going out, looking for people who have domain experience, and saying that they will teach them about sales, rather than getting the traditional sales rep and saying, "God, I hope I can teach them my business."
JC: What's the most important lesson you think most sales executives haven't learned yet?
JD: When we are brought in, it's typically because something is broken—revenue is down, margins are eroding, the channel is not selling as much, and so on. And we ask them, "What have you done so far?" And they always tell us these wonderful things they've done to understand the sales cycle—called in the reps, done win/loss analysis with the sales guys, and all this other inward-looking stuff.
I have said this to pretty much every client I have had over the past five years—"So, how many customers did you call? Where's your forecast from last quarter, and of the 120 names here, how many customers did you ask why they bought from you, why they bought from the competition, or why they had no decision?" They are so focused on what they do that they don't realize we do a sales cycle because a customer is doing a buy cycle, and we need to start looking at what customers are doing.
We also need to realize that the buying process changed three years ago. As soon as the economy tanked, personal signature authorities plummeted. A colleague who is a manager in a manufacturing company had his personal authority of $500,000 in 2000 dropped to $25,000. He is not the economic buyer anymore, he needs to go to the senior management meeting on Monday and present the business case on behalf of the vendors to get approval. Internally, customers are all fighting for money.
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None of the companies mentioned in this article have been clients of CRMuse LLC or Jason Compton for at least the past six months.
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