A Brief Summary and Dismissal of All the Sales Literature Ever Written, and Why Sales Pipelines are Silly

Hold on to your hats guys, we’re going off on a tangent.

This post is an exploration of the sales processes of large B2B enterprises, with the goal of understanding why it is unwise to model our sales processes after theirs.

If there’s one lesson I hope you’ll take away here, it’s that traditional sales methodologies don’t apply to our industry, for two main reasons:

1. We’re not really salespeople in the traditional sense. We’re not pushing one-off sales, and we’re not solution-sellers. Rather, we’re building long term partnerships with our retailers, based on trust and mutual benefit.
2. We represent small businesses, and most of the sales literature out there is written for big businesses.

So, kick back while I summarize for you everything I’ve gathered about modern sales organizations, and the lingo and strategies they employ. Hopefully this will save you from having to slog through endless sales drivel, only to find yourself as empty handed as Ol’ Gil up there.

Modern “Enterprise” Sales Team Organization

In business-speak, the term “Enterprise” isn’t the same as the dictionary definition, which is simply “a business or company.” Rather, “Enterprise” basically means “really huge business.” We’re talking businesses with hundreds to thousands of employees, as opposed to Small and Medium-Sized Businesses, or SMBs.

Most of the sales writing out there is geared towards Enterprises rather than SMBs, and for good reason: big business is where the money’s at. Naturally, businesses with hundreds to thousands of employees need some structure and division of labor. Indeed, there’s a buzzword for exactly that: Sales Force Automation, “the practice of turning sales into a repeatable, automated process.” ¹

An assembly line, in other words.

So what do I mean when I say that sales force automation is like a sales assembly line? Well, imagine how assembly lines work in manufacturing: The bosses at the company put together a very structured and rigid plan for how manufacturing should work, broken into small, independent steps. Each worker learns how to perform one of those steps to perfection, and they just repeat that step over and over. After they’ve completed their step of the process, they hand the item that’s being manufactured off to the next person and start their step over again with the next item.

-Tyler King ²

Here’s how the assembly line analogy translates to an Enterprise sales organization: the bosses put together a blueprint for how their company’s sales process should function in converting leads into customers, broken out into individual steps. Each member of the sales team is specialized in one of those steps, and responsible for doing it over and over. Once a team member completes their step, they pass the lead off to a rep from the next stage of the process, who takes it one step further, and so on, until the sale is complete. Step, repeat, step, repeat. This is the piston that fires the engine that drives the sales machine.

There is a broad division of labor that you can expect to find in a typical Enterprise sales organization. Depending on the size of the organization, each of the following divisions could be subdivided into more specialized units.

To begin with, leads (the fuel of our sales engine) are generated through the efforts of the marketing department. A “lead” is simply a contact or business that has the potential to become a customer. Business Development Representatives (aka Biz Dev Reps) judge whether those leads are “qualified” or “unqualified” by picking up the phone, determining the lead’s level of interest, and gauging their viability as a customer. The Biz Dev Rep passes qualified leads on to the appropriate Sales Rep (depending on territory, specialty, etc). The Sales Rep’s job is to convert qualified leads into customers. Sales Reps may be subdivided into Outside Sales Reps — the pavement-pounders who make face-to-face sales calls — and Inside Sales Reps, who work the phones and email. Once the deal is won and the prospect becomes a customer, the customer is passed on to an Account Manager (aka Customer Success Manager), whose job is to provide support to existing customers and milk them for every dollar they’re worth.

Does your sales team look anything like this?

An Enterprise sales organization may have hundreds of reps, each one a cog in this giant sales machine. These reps answer to their Sales Manager, who answers to the Regional Sales Manager, who answers to the National Sales Manager, who answers to the Sales Director, who answers to the Chief Sales Officer.

In the upper echelons of an Enterprise sales organization is the wizard behind the curtain, the Sales Operations Manager. This person has to be the most envied sumbitch in these organizations—they get paid the big bucks without ever having to make a single cold call. How do they manage it? What’s their secret?

Sales Operations Managers are the tacticians behind the organization, whose job it is to “support, enable, and drive front line sales teams to sell better, faster, and more efficiently.” These wizards “use data to drive strategy, best practices to guide training, and technology to hack success.” ³

Enough already! you cry. Enough with the business speak. What does any of this have to do with anything?!

My point precisely! Enterprise-level sales organizations bear little resemblance to our own, yet they form the basis for nearly all the sales literature out there, and all the technological solutions.

This disconnect is the source of much confusion, wasted time, and wasted money. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the concept of Pipelines.

Sales Pipelines (And Why They Are Silly)

“Pipeline” is upper management speak for what any sales rep with half a brain knows they need to do: convert leads into customers.

Does the rep need to be systematic in how they go about managing their time and effort? Of course. That will be a big subject of future discussions here at Shelf Life.

Is lead conversion important for Small Wholesale Producers? Undoubtedly! Accounts are always fizzling out, and replacing them is essential for growth.

But is Pipeline methodology actually that useful for us? I don’t think so. It may be useful for Enterprise organizations, which think of their leads as faceless fodder for growth. But for us, leads are businesses that we want to form long term partnerships with. Each new lead is a unique retailer that your product may or may not be a good fit for.

Creating a pipeline for a sales organization requires narrow definitions of the different stages of lead conversion, and rigid sales processes based off of these definitions. Out of these definitions grow these mind-numbingly complex, self-deceiving visual representations of an idealized sales cycle:

Terrible, Terrible, Terrible

Pipelines assume a frictionless universe, where every interaction fits neatly into a stage of the “buyer’s journey” to becoming a customer. (“Buyer’s journey” — even more cringeworthy than “Pipeline.”)

Nevertheless, sales reps use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to log every single interaction with each lead, while advancing them through the different stages of the pipeline. This is a requirement of their job because the pipeline is meant to be:

1. a forecasting tool that can be used to estimate the amount of new business a company can expect to bring in during a given period of time;
2. a way of holding reps accountable for making quota and achieving sales goals.

Here’s the thing though: all of this assumes that the different stages of the pipeline are accurate predictors of how likely it is that a lead will become a customer. But if you’ve ever tried to sell into a store, you know that there is no earthly way to predict whether a store will place an opening order, or to even estimate the probability that they will, let alone the probability that they’ll place repeat orders. This is because buyers can be fickle beings, and they certainly never reveal their full decision process to a salesperson.

Since it is mere guesswork how close a lead is to becoming a customer, any sales forecast or performance judgement that is based off of a pipeline is bound to be skewed. “Garbage in, garbage out,” as they say, and anything you put in there is essentially garbage.

Sales Directors don’t want to think about this problem though. It isn’t convenient for forming projections, planning for demand, and calculating sales goals. It’s messy and unscientific, when what they really want is precision, performance, and a well-oiled sales machine!

Metrics! I need metrics! How can I support, enable, and drive my sales team to sell better, faster, and more efficiently without metrics?!

Fear not, Directors! There is a way. What, without metrics?! Yes! We’ll get to what this looks like exactly in upcoming posts. It may mean less time hiding behind spreadsheets (⊙⊙) and more time shadowing and listening to your reps, but I guarantee you better results!

If your CEO demands hard numbers for next year’s sales, just pick one out of thin air. You’ll be no further from the mark than if you based the number off of a sales pipeline, and you and your team will have so much more time to focus on the work that really matters.

This of course assumes that you’ve trained your sales reps to instinctually understand that they need to be working continuously to bring on new customers. And as a director, you must be just as attuned to your customers as your reps are, and with that knowledge, your job is to enable your reps to bring on new customers given their time restrictions and the inherent limitations of your product and the market.

But more on that in upcoming posts.

Conclusion

Way back in Shelf Life’s very first post, we talked about solution-selling vs transactional-selling, and how the products that we represent don’t fit into either category. I think we are now qualified to dispense with most of the prevailing sales wisdom out there, or at least to pick and choose from it what works for us as we create our own methodology.

I want to finish with a quote that really drives all this home for me:

Large companies are all about scale. They need to be able to hire armies of sales reps, plug them into the assembly line, and easily replace them when employees inevitably quit or get fired. Each person is a cog in the machine, and with hundreds or thousands of employees, you need to make sure each cog is automated to perfection.

Small businesses normally don’t operate that way. The main reason a small business is able to compete with their larger competitors is because they can offer a more personal experience to their customers, and that means letting their sales reps behave like humans rather than robots. If a small business tries to automate the sales process, they’re removing the main advantage they had over big companies, and they’re not likely to win that battle.

-Tyler King ⁴

¹https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/resources/Salesforce_Automation_Definition
² ibid
³ https://www.saleshacker.com/what-is-sales-operations/
⁴https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/resources/Salesforce_Automation_Definition