Several years ago I had the good fortune to tour the Oshkosh Truck Company’s manufacturing operation. As most of you know, Oshkosh Truck’s vehicles play an important role in military conflicts around the world. At the time of my tour, the company was in the throws of a competitive battle of its own for a large military contract.
As the list of competitors eventually narrowed, only one other company posed a challenge to Oshkosh, which manufactures the most rugged off-road vehicles on the planet.
The final step in the selection process was a face-off contest between the two competing vehicles. Water, sand, deep mud, steep inclines—the most abusive off-road conditions the military could conceive of.
Although the contest had been designed to cover several days, within a few hours both entries returned to the starting gate. One of them had gotten stuck in the mud, and it was being towed by the vehicle from Oshkosh—which, by gosh, won the contract.
That kind of product dominance makes salespeople drool. They get to tell the story over and over to every prospect, winning one deal after another.
But selling no longer works that way. Product superiority, especially the kind of product domination enjoyed by our salivating sales professional, has increasingly become the stuff of dreams—and just as elusive. Amid fevered competition and rapid-fire technological development, innovations last about as long as a Hollywood marriage. No one stays King of the Hill for very long.
For years now, business-to-business companies have been trying to rise to this challenge by “selling” their way to competitive advantage. “We’ll differentiate ourselves through our sales force!” became their collective mantra. So companies ran their salespeople through any number of popular “strategic” sales training programs.
Many of those companies would argue to this day that their approach really made a difference. Perhaps. But if it did, why was turnover among top sales performers so high as they jumped from one hot-product company to the next? It’s simple. The game was still all about pitting product Tweedledum against product Tweedledee, with the spoils going largely to the sales reps who were most persuasive in communicating information about the product—and lucky enough to get the best territories.
But that’s old news. The nearly complete absence of a sustainable competitive advantage through product superiority is yesterday’s business story. So is the failed notion that somehow the sales force can compensate by sheer “salesmanship” or by trying to show some value-added goodies that would swing a deal. These realities are the sales rep’s first problem.
The second—and infinitely more serious—problem is that the sales rep’s customers just don’t need him anymore! At least not the way they used to. Distill selling to its essence and you see two things that salespeople have always done to bring value to customers: communicate information and facilitate transactions. Almost overnight these two core functions of the salesperson have lost their value.
“Initially, sales reps were horrified to have pricing, one of their most powerful tools, wrenched from their grasp,” says George Roberts, the former head of Oracle’s North American sales division. Salespeople would say, “My value-add before was negotiating contracts. What’s my value-add now?”
These functions—communicating information and facilitating transactions—remain the lifeblood of the selling profession, even to this day. Let’s remember that it was more than ten years ago when Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel Corporation) made his prophetic statement: “The sales structure of the future is going to be different. Salespeople are not going to be involved with order-taking and information flow at the most basic level.”
Am I painting a picture of the obsolescence of the salesperson? Well, yes! But only the ones who still define themselves in traditional terms. And there’s no more traditional way of defining oneself than by one’s ability to communicate information and close deals.
Do you define yourself that way? Here’s one way to find out. Ask yourself if you agree with the following statement: “In order for me to succeed in sales I must master the ability to communicate information?” If you do agree (and my statistics say that more than 90 percent of you do), ask yourself if you want to change.
If you’re inclined to change—to reinvent yourself—there’s one critical first step. Several times every day, practice saying to yourself—preferably aloud—that same statement but with a different ending: “In order for me to succeed in sales I must master the ability to understand the customer’s world.”
Say it! Repeat it! Believe it! If you do, you will be well on your way to redefining yourself as a sales professional for the new era of selling.
