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We continue to organize our sales and marketing initiatives around what makes us more efficient or old views of how customers buy. The overall marketing/sales assemblyline takes customers through this linear process, all oriented to moving the customer through a buying decision.
When I started selling, I had the responsibility for growing a very large banking account. I focused on understanding my customer, identifying opportunities to grow, and building our value with the customers. So specialists in check processing helped customer re-engineer their processes.
In complex B2B buying, it’s popular to talk about being consultative and/or creating value with our customers. We talk about sales people as problem solvers, working with our customers to identify and help solve their problems. We are creating massive sales assemblylines optimizing the order taking process.
Their approach is to exploit the “relationship,” but not the value they create in helping the customer achieve their goals. Neither of those extremes is about relationships, neither of these extremes understands the importance of relationships with our customers. Andy poses that relationships are about “connection.”
How you organize your sales team will be determined by the regions you serve, the number of products and services you offer, the size of your sales team, and the size and industry of your customers. Manages day-to-day operations of sales organization, such as forecasting and tool administration. The AssemblyLine.
Outreach enables accurate sales forecasting, replaces manual processes with real-time guidance, and unlocks actionable customer intelligence to help you win more often. The second aspect of the predictive revenue model is the sales assemblyline or seller specialization or sales handoffs , primarily the AE/CSM split.
Prospectors prospect, accountmanagersaccountmanage, product line specialists are expert in their product lines, and on and on… Each role is precisely defined, we have the metrics to by which we constantly measure performance. The customer buying cycle is, as Hank Barnes puts it, “Squishy.”
There are all sorts of phrases like, “people buy from people,” which ascribe the importance of building relationships with our customers. Yet, it seems that too much of how we actually manage the customer engagement life cycle seems to ignore the importance of developing relationships with our customers.
And we have the convergence of information overwhelm, increased sources of distraction, accelerating change, and skyrocketing complexity–in our customers markets, in their own organizations, with competition/partners, and within our own organization. At the same time, sales performance continues to stagnate or even decline.
We have highly focused roles, each role focuses on it’s job in the sales process, once complete, the widget–I mean customer, is passed to the next function, then the next, then the next… on down the sales assemblyline. Ironically, customers are the sole reason for sales people to exist!
This trend is, unfortunately, doing exactly the opposite of what our customers need and what enables us to create the greatest value with them. These are about the only things that customers value in their interaction with sales people. These are the things that only a sales person can do.
Isn’t it ultra-satisfying to watch a perfectly automated factory assemblyline? That’s how your customer experience should be. Salespeople create relationships, but it has traditionally been up to the customer success or accountmanagement team to nurture them. See how smooth things are?
A terrific strategy for driving product line growth. But then the questions come, Who is responsible for the customer relationship? Who is responsible for maximizing our share of customer? What experience do we want to create, how do we want the customer to “think” of our company?
Size of customers. With the role of HR Manager. The AssemblyLine. In the assemblyline model, leads are handed off between specialized teams to make sure that they move through all of the stages in a sales cycle. Risk of poor customer experience due to many handoffs.Additional costs from specialization.
Apparently the speakers were noticing the fact that to develop trust and confidence with our customers, we have to build some sort of relationship. The discussion went further, discussing concepts around FOFU, sensemaking, decision confidence, all requiring some level of relationship in helping the customer understand and move forward.
Its narrow offerings were all produced in an assembly-line-style system. A customer calls to complain. There are expectations to maintain between prospects and sales, clients and accountmanagers, and between core team members and the rest of the agency. Harry continues to take on new projects and responsibilities.
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