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Continuing my series on applying lean/agile manufacturing principles to selling, I was reminded by Charles Green and Dave Jackson about an important aspect of these principles that is never mentioned by those promoting lean/agile in our sales assemblylines. We have to trust them to do the work. And there’s an added bonus!
What we fail to recognize in all these conversations is our customers are quietly changing how they buy faster than we are changing how we sell. And customers have quickly recognized these and adapted, not responding to our clever outreaches, multichannel, multitouch. As a result, sellers are playing a losing game of catch up.
Do you genuinely care about your customers? ” Crickets…… I realize, they don’t understand what the customer is trying to achieve, what it means to them, why it’s important. Or I ask something, innocently, of sellers, “How is your customer measured? Those assemblylines are failing!
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.
Middle of the sales funnel (MoFu): Potential customers. Bottom of the sales funnel (BoFu): New and existing customers. You offer the potential customer a freebie known as a lead magnet in exchange for their email address. You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product.
Customers have become depersonalized widgets that we move along our selling assemblylines. The people impacted are those that trusted management and do the work management directed. For years, I’ve been writing about the mechanization of selling. Our people have become replaceable widgets as well.
I believe that selling is a disciplined process, that we can “engineer” those processes to increase our impact, customer engagement, and our effectiveness. For the moment, let’s put those pesky customers to the side and think about ourselves. Much of this seems to be a R 3.0 approach to Predictable Revenue.
I believe selling is a set of disciplined processes, many of which can be “engineered” to optimize our ability to engage the right customers/prospects, with the right conversations, at the right time. Even to the point that some commoditized or repeat buys are completely automated on the customer and supplier sides.
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.
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!
We start feeding customers through our process, moving them from person to person. The SDR passes the customer to a BDR who passes the customer to an AM (Account Manager), who engages a Demoer, than a Product Line specialist. But something else happens, our most efficient process doesn’t match how our customers buy.
Not those superficial relationships (backslapping, jokes, lunches, golf games), but those relationships where sales people understood the customer, organizationally and individually. Specialization prevails as customers are moved from sales specialist to sales specialist, passing along the optimized sales 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.
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 redesign knowledge work, emulating the principles of the industrial assemblylines of the past. We chop up work, creating assemblylines where knowledge workers focus on perhaps the functional equivalent of tightening a bolt. them passing the work to the next person in the knowledge worker assemblyline.
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.
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. Prepares sellers for customer engagements via training and onboarding activities. The AssemblyLine.
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.”
Likewise customers are widgets in our sales assemblyline. Look At Our Dashboards" Is Your Customer Prepared For This Meeting? In our quest for efficiency, we treat people as replaceable widgets. If someone isn’t performing, we fire them, replacing them with someone else, and someone else.
We seem to be approaching or passing the tipping point where leading sales practitioners view successful selling as a disciplined, focused, engineered approach to engaging and creating value for customers. I hope we no longer live by the mantra, “When the going gets tough, the tough take a customer to lunch/golf.”
DDA works by looking at all the touchpoints, like clicks and video engagements, on your Search (including Shopping), YouTube and Display ads in Google Ads to compare the paths of customers who converted with ones who didn’t. The result is a cookie-cutter, assemblyline style of marketing that prioritizes measurement over customer needs.
And it’s certainly a red thread we see with all our kind of like top performing guests is this idea of, you know, regardless of your role, you are there for one reason only to make the cust The company and your customers successful and you know, it takes wearing many different hats, um, on many different days. Um, but, uh, I love that.
Already, I’m seeing articles on, “Do these 5 things… The 10 critical success factors… These technologies are critical to customer engagement in 2020…” I’m no different, I’m jumping into the fray with the secrets to sales success in 2020. Third, it’s really tough, boring, tedious stuff.
For years, the work of many revenue operations (RevOps) teams have largely been determined by immediate customer needs. As sales, marketing, and customer success teams work more closely together, RevOps has the opportunity to foster a future-focused atmosphere that encourages proactive problem solving.
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 account management team to nurture them. See how smooth things are? There’s no friction whatsoever.
Getting past the first stage of revenue growth and building an initial customer base is the easy part, but what happens when you hit a revenue plateau and can’t seem to take that next step? In a traditional business framework, marketing, sales, and customer success are siloed. Trusting opinion more than data.
How on earth can that be a bad idea, when all customers care about is ROI? Picture this: You’re a software sales rep and you gave a stellar demo to your customer’s CFO. In other words, for every dollar your customer spends, they get 40 dollars in return. You need to tailor your message to your customer’s strategic priorities.
If you do it wrong, you alienate your customers. This is the downside of the modern Sales AssemblyLine — both buyer and seller feeling like a cog in the wheel. This seemed space age to me, so I called her desk line using DiscoverOrg and got her message machine. Obsesses over your ICP (ideal customer profile).
For example, Business Development in a SaaS scaleup usually involves a lot of cold outreach to potential customers. In a big, multinational company, on the other hand, Business Development may do market analysis for new-market entry or a new line of products. . BDRs and SDRs work in different stages of the customer journey.
We know customers struggle with buying, yet none of our programs or activities focus on helping them learn how to buy, or helping them align the diverse interests in the buying group. We know people buy from people, yet we create assemblyline/transactional processes. If there is buying, there will always be a need for selling!
Marketing is just often seen as a cost center since we’re not directly bringing in revenue like sales or customer success,” Marcotullio said. In many instances, it’s still seen as a creative support function to sales, not as a function that has bottom-line impacts.” said Brooke Duffy , a fractional CRO for B2B SaaS. Duffy said.
We don’t take the time to build relationships and trust. We view the process as a transaction, moving the customer from person to person on our sales assemblylines. We automate our engagement processes focusing more on our efficiency, than building confidence with the customer. But none of this is new!
After all, some jobs have already been replaced by AI and robotics ( assemblylines come to mind). AI can analyze reams of data and identify patterns, but it can’t build those relationships or establish trust with prospects for you. . Gong captures customer-facing conversations across email, phone, and web conferencing.
So the customer themself loves that, it’s just a way for them to save money and make sure they’re being accurate. So can you tell us a little bit about one of your customers maybe? Like who’s a typical customer type? How do you bring the best to your customers? Adam Honig: Yeah, I love that.
Ever felt like you’re in a never-ending game of hide and seek with potential customers? Sure, the mechanics behind it might seem as intricate as clockwork—but don’t worry; we’ll break down how simple gears and sprockets turn strangers into paying customers. Ready to dive in?
There’s medical applications, there’s industrial applications, and so we have customers in a wide range of fields that rely on our machines every day. We have machines that are entry-level machines where customers transition from one type of packaging to our type of packaging. How big are they? Is that the kind of output?
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. You want a trusted team with skin in the game at your side as you move into the implementation phase. A customer calls to complain. The owner realizes that by blindly trusting Harry, he has put his business in serious jeopardy. Live by them.
Each of our customers’ strategies, goals, priorities, culture, and values are different. Why do customers not respond to our outreach? Why does research show that customers don’t like their buying experiences? We never pause to consider: What if we change how we engage our customers? Then we wonder.
Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is a cross-department process that helps ensure companies have the right amount of products to satisfy customers without extra stock piling up. Operations planning process: Ensure resources, such as raw materials and manufacturing capacity, are available to meet projected customer demand.
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