A POWERFUL DRIVER OF REVENUES

“The sales force is a powerful driver of revenues and because salespeople are entrusted with a company’s most important asset — its relationship with its customers — they have a significant and often determining impact on an organisation’s success.” — Zoltners, Sinha, Lorimer (2009).

SIX CHARACTERISTICS

Well, if a company’s sales force is so critical to its success we must ask, “What characterises the modern sales force?” Moncrief and Marshall (2005) offer a perspective that is worthy of your consideration. They claim that there are six characteristics of modern selling as follows:

1.

Customer retention and deletion. Applying Pareto’s Rule, 80 per cent of your profits will come from 20 per cent of your customers. That’s why, as painful as it may be, the best sales organisations do the math and know which customers are just too expensive to keep; because doing so will deflect attention from those more deserving.

2.

Database and knowledge management: The modern sales force needs to be trained in the use and creation of customer databases, and how to use the internet for greater effectiveness.

3.

Customer relationship management: This requires that the sales force focuses on the long term and not simply on closing the next sale. The emphasis should be on creating win-win situations with customers so that both parties to the interaction gain and want to continue the relationship. In fact, I prefer not to close sales, but rather to obtain the right commitments and open new relationships!

4.

Market the product: The modern salesperson is involved in a much broader range of activities than simply planning and making a sales presentation. Only today I was coaching a salesperson whose product had the same features and “benefits” as their main competitors’ but her price was higher. With the conventional sales conversation about features, advantages and benefits rendered useless, she built a compelling argument around the “soft differentiators”, such as corporate image, positioning strategy etc., and ended up winning the business without price discounting.

5.

Problem solving and system selling: Modern selling, particularly in business-to-business situations, is no longer about identifying problems and offering solutions. Modern selling often involves multiple calls, the use of a team-selling approach and considerable analytical skills to be effective in some situations.

6.

Satisfy needs and add value: The modern salesperson must have the ability to identify and satisfy customer needs. This includes the ability to unearth unstated needs, delight needs and secret needs. Now that can be magical! And at the highest level, modern salespeople know when to discuss their clients’ strategic priorities. Not “features and benefits”.

But there’s one more characteristic of the modern sales force. Modern salespeople put the customer at the centre of everything that they do because they know that their job is to identify and satisfy customer needs profitably. And that is the simplest definition of marketing.

Herman Alvaranga is president of the Caribbean School of Sales Management, the region’s first Public Training College specialising in sales and marketing education, training, consulting and research. E-mail him at hdalvaranga@cssm.edu.jm