Customer is the only Accelerator, even sales as we know is dead!
Why whole-organization building with radical customer-centricity is the only thing that works and not just, maximizing performance of your Sales.
Experiences from addressing Business Makeovers
One of the hardest things when you’re trying to affect change is that, you’ve gotta start with the Customer Experience and work backwards to the technology. Not starting with, let’s sit down with the engineers and figure what awesome technology we have and how we’re gonna market that. ~Steve Jobs
Sales as we know is Dead. Growth is a challenge everywhere.
Almost every news article that you read today, on industry and business, including the INDIA story is about shunted growth. Falling short of the promised growth, is a major concern not just at the country level (India’s GDP as an example), industry level (auto-industry as an example), company level (cognizant laying off 13,000 employees), but is true even at individual sales-person level. According to the Salesforce State of Sales Report, 57% of salespeople missed their quota in 2018 and the percentage is even more in 2019.
What is really unfolding?
In my personal experience too, in the past 3–4 months, falling sales numbers has become a serious concern in a couple of major business accounts we are helping. Missing sales quotas and unsold inventory is a symptom, a symbol of a much more deep rooted problem which founders and business owners have to address immediately. What is the real problem?
Just Sales Maximization and Siloed Sales Operations never work. Overhauling the entire operations or Business Makeover is needed.
If you know a little bit of System’s thinking, you know that local optimization won’t work. Eli Goldratt demonstrated it very well in his book Goal, and via his business-makeover of manufacturing in 1983. He showed then, that siloed over-reliance on production-and-inventory without looking at the entire value-chain as a whole, in fact leads to systemic losses. Today, the same is getting repeated in a different SILO, sales. There is over-reliance on sales-and-marketing as the primary means of driving company growth, instead of a company-wide, cross-functional team effort.
Systems thinking is critical for any business owner. For e.g. If we consider our body as a system, and want to increase our fitness, just over-reliance on reducing belly-fat alone will never work, only whole-body work-out helps. Yet, learning from such daily experiences and applying it to business-systems, is completely missing in at least the Indian business owners. Just Sales Maximization will never work. However in almost every company today, every owner and manager’s decisions are based purely on their incentives, their bonus, their stock compensations. Further, the same trickle down effect is on to salespersons too. The only motivation for the salesperson is his/her commission or remuneration, and the only training people seem to be interested in, is sales-training, and almost no-focus on the customer, their journey or their emotions.
In my own conversations and efforts with business owners, most time and energy goes into reshaping the business to focus on the WHOLE. Business owners are too busy to rethink the whole.
Starting with understanding the changing customer-profile, their already changed journey-map and their shifted mindset leading to overall market shifts. For e.g. Customer mindsets have shifted from reliability on Job-Stability to relying on Job-Mobility. Yet, real-estate salespersons are still only focused on closing sales, based on stability of 20 year home-ownership. When most customer’s jobs itself are unstable, Mobility takes center-stage not stability, and that means home buyers today not only need help to buy, but also need help to quickly become home-sellers. New customer journey hence, will involve helping the customers remodel, refurbish, resell and repurchase their homes too. This cannot be addressed by siloed sales-incentives to only help the customer to BUY, this needs a business makeover and overhauling of the entire CRM and business-model. Sales models as you know are Dead.
Customer is the Only true Accelerator. Emotions and not reasons, are the only true Catalyst.
Management must not think of itself as producing products but providing customer-creating value satisfactions. The entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer-satisfying organism. ~Phillip Kotler
Steve Blank, the startup guru, wrote a book on Customer Development, not product development or Sales development. Building a business is about dealing with the human messiness in Building Teams, Building Customers and Building Partners in your ecosystem, not just technology. And the most critical of them all, is of course the Customer. The only way to become truly customer-centric, is to obsess about the Customer Journey. But each of us are trained from our childhood all the way up to college, to only Self-Actualize. Our habits are mostly around expanding our own ideas, our work, and our achievements. Truly successful people however invest in harder habits, of thinking about serving and servicing the OTHER. Even 25 years ago, Steve Jobs was thinking about Customer Development and knew serving the customer starts by learning to connect with the customer’s experience. Not starting with, let’s sit down with the engineers and figure what awesome technology we have and how we’re gonna market and sell that.
Customer Experience itself starts with emotions. All experience, not just customer experience is really about emotions. A movie experience, or a book, even this blog article without emotions, will be drab, dry and pedantic, isn’t it? If you truly want to sell goods worth billions of dollars, start by investing first in Human emotions. As a salesperson you need to continuously be in touch with the dilemmas, strategies, practical limitations, frustrations and excitement experienced by customers in their dealings with their vendors. Focusing on the whole is the hardest thing to do, but if you learn quickly from people who have been successful, you will make cheaper mistakes, if you wait to learn from your own experience, they can turn-out to be very costly.
Conclusion
Whether you are doing platform-based selling, solution-led selling, consultative selling or relationship selling, old sales models and most business models are dead. Customer is the only true accelerator, and agile business makeovers are the need of the hour. Maker’s practice is a framework for all such Business Makeovers.. whether its a startup/SME/Corporate we help in Makeovers. Maker’s Practice is the Art and Science of Making Things Happen. If you are interested to learn about how to go about your business makeover, please write to us or leave a comment here.
