The days of waging battle against customers – also known as provoking, challenging, deepening the pain – are gone. Now, success comes from getting in the trenches with the customer and working toward a win-win outcome. That’s the only path. To survive in a world of supremely educated buyers who, above anything else, are time-poor, hungry for insight and demanding progress, unless you can assume the customer’s perspective, enriched by your experience with other similar customers, your outcomes will never be great.
On a recent panel at Dreamforce I was asked about the most important competency required for a salesperson in the future. My answer was simple: customer-centricity. I have written before that the impact in a customer of a bad buying decision is usually greater than the impact of a sales person of a lost deal. Sales winners today and into the future will actually care more about the impact to the customer, taking a long-term view and relegating to a distance second place the commission they earn on a deal. To be successful we need understand that we live in a Customer Activated Enterprise.
We are increasingly in a subscription economy earning our customers trust and business one month at a time. In the buyer-seller world this has indeed become a SaaS world – but in this context SaaS means Salesperson As A Service, reliable, trusted, always-on. We believe that great salespeople are those that aren’t doing much “selling” at all. They’re the ones that build trust by being generous with their energy and expertise. The ones that are skilled at understanding, not outmaneuvering.
The sellers that will be successful are those that benefit more from their Customer’s Network Value than the outmoded measure of Customer Lifetime Value. Remember that, rather than calling a supplier for information, in many cases customers are looking for recommendations from peers and others ‘like them’ to short-list potential suppliers, refine their requirements, and gain insight that often surpasses that of the traditional ‘product first’ sales person.
Better than your own solutions, you need to know your customer. That requires a deep understanding of the challenges that face each of the key roles in the customer organization (in the area that you can impact). Only then can you offer a solution to meet those needs and position your product as a solution that will optimize the outcome for the customer.
To care about your Customer’s Network Value, you must first care about your customer, and treat customer service, and every customer interaction as an extension of your promise to your customer. Caring about your customers before they become customers is more difficult but increasingly important.
When we design our Dealmaker solutions the experience we look to deliver through our software and support is designed to enable and celebrate the heroes of the sales department – the value creators – those who get to understand that they are part of a Customer Activated Enterprise: Salesperson As A Service.
If you want to read more of my blogs please subscribe to Think for a Living blog. Follow me on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn. I want you to agree or disagree with me, but most of all: I want you to bring passion to the conversation.
Donal Daly is Executive Chairman of Altify having founded the company in 2005. He is author of numerous books and ebooks including the Amazon #1 Best-sellers Account Planning in Salesforce and Tomorrow | Today: How AI Impacts How We Work, Live, and Think. Altify is Donal’s fifth global business enterprise.