Cracking the value code
Four ways salespeople contribute value to their own companies
By Jerry Stapleton, for SBT
How do salespeople contribute value to their companies? It’s a simple enough question. And one that, you’d think, every CEO would have a ready answer to. But most I’ve talked with don’t. At least not one that’s much deeper than something about "closing deals" or "driving revenue." That’s like saying the CFO contributes value by counting money.
Everyone in any company should be able to articulate how he or she contributes to the top and bottom lines of their companies.
Salespeople are no exception.
They, too, must be able to draw that line of logic from what they say to customers and how they strategize sales opportunities back to financial gain for the company. They should be able to show a cause/effect relationship, not just a correlation, between their activities and tangible benefits to the company. It’s shortsighted to look simply at "numbers." At best, such a view gives us only a correlation – and often not a very strong one at that.
So how do salespeople contribute value?
Is it by getting customers to give them "last look?" Perhaps, but only if you define your company’s financial gain in terms of being the low bidder as often as possible.
Do they do it by responding well to customer needs? Arguably, but we are talking about sales here, not customer service. If responsiveness is a key component of value, then the job is edging dangerously close to service; don’t call it sales.
Is their value contribution in building rapport with customers? Many salespeople might have us think that it is. That is, until that deal that was "in the bag" goes south despite the "great relationship" between salesperson and customer.
We are in an era of results. An era of measurable value contribution. Could, say, an engineer, a shop floor manager or an accountant claim that his or her value falls into the category of "special art?" Hardly! Why should salespeople be able to make such a claim?
They shouldn’t. Here are four ways that salespeople, by virtue of how they sell, can contribute value to their own companies. They can do so by:
1. Decreasing sensitivity to "purchase price" – Great salespeople are able to cause customers to look at the "total cost of ownership" or "total value of ownership" of their offerings, instead of the "purchase price.
One thing you’ll never hear a great salesperson say? "This customer is a price-buyer." A price-buying customer is so because the salesperson allowed it. Sounds idealistic. It’s not. But it’s not easy, either. Those salespeople who know how to gain a deep understanding of their customers’ businesses and who gain access to real power players in the company – where value is valued – frequently succeed in steering the buying criteria in the direction of total cost of ownership, away from purchase price.
2. Creating demand for their company and its offerings – Too often, salespeople think only in terms of fulfilling demand. Sure, chasing known opportunities – that’s what fulfilling demand is – is still part of the mix for the modern day sales professional. But it should be a diminishing part of that mix, giving way, instead, to chasing unknown opportunities – i.e. creating demand.
The notion of demand creation isn’t as esoteric as it may at first sound. At the start of a client engagement my firm attempts to characterize each client’s current state using an assessment instrument. One of the questions asks – and I’ll paraphrase here – if the salesperson believes that his or her company has a significant number of existing customers that are buying only a small part of what they could be buying from the client’s company. The majority of salespeople across our client base respond with a "strongly agree" to the question. Tapping that potential from existing customers is an example of demand creation.
3. Spending their time and their company’s resources on the right opportunities – Who says "The customer is always right?" Vendors do. Great salespeople (That is, those who have reached the level of Business Resource) don’t embrace that cliché.
They assess sales opportunities with brutal objectivity and act on that objectivity. They deploy resources in such a way that the opportunities with the greatest potential and highest "winability" get the most attention. These salespeople are not afraid to say "no" – to anyone! This is how they win the most deals and keep the most customers. It’s also how they avoid ever becoming any customer’s free technical resource – a status that once carried with it a high measure of value in the eyes of many salespeople’s managers.
4. Compressing sales cycles – Great salespeople are not pushy. They’re not superstar closers. Instead, they’re professionals who sell with a process and know where they are in the process. As a result, they look at every interaction with a customer as an opportunity to advance the sales campaign.
What’s more, they believe in their right to ask very direct questions as regards the "fit" between the two companies. In short, great salespeople empower themselves, from the very start of every sales campaign, to steer the customer, not be steered by the customer (usually, in the name of some pseudo customer-focus principle). Only those salespeople who steer the customer (again, not to be confused with being aggressive or pushy) will, whenever it’s within the realm of possibility, be able to compress sales cycles.
It’s the leadership team, stupid!
Few salespeople are wired to contribute value in these ways. Few possess the required mind-set and proficiencies. It’s not their fault, really. Salespeople are a product of the environments created for them by their companies’ leadership – usually, their CEOs.
This isn’t, necessarily, to assign blame to executives either. For the most part, they’ve tried to apply the state-of-the-art in the selling sciences, as they understood it. Well, the science of selling has advanced. It’s now time for CEOs to redefine the function of their sales organizations. And establishing criteria for value contribution from the sales force seems to me like a good place to start.
Jerry Stapleton is president of Stapleton Resources LLC, a Waukesha-based sales force effectiveness practice. He can be reached at 262-524-8099 or on the Web at www.stapletonresources.com.
March 21, 2003 Small Business Times, Milwaukee
