The world of sales has changed dramatically over the past few years. Customers can easily access a ton of information online. All that easily-available information is changing the way people do business.
- Customers can often buy online, bypassing the need for salespeople altogether.
- Customers are more informed about competitive offerings than ever before.
- There is so much information online that customers can feel overwhelmed and have difficulty navigating all their options.
- Salespeople often don’t have the opportunity to engage with customers until later in the process, after a lot of the thinking and research has already been done.
All this adds up to a need for more educated, more consultative salespeople who can exhibit the following:
- An ability to demonstrate empathy and a deep understanding of their customers’ needs, typical problems, and priorities.
- A thorough and up-to-date understanding of not just their own company’s offerings, but the competition as well, including strengths and weaknesses of the products, services and solutions that are readily available.
- The ability to help customers navigate the complexity of the many options that are available and work closely with them to co-design solutions that not only meet existing needs but anticipate the needs and priorities of the future.
In short, salespeople need to become an authentic, valued business partner to customers. Unfortunately, while companies have been saying they do this for a long time, the reality is that most companies are sending out the same sales people to do the same job as before, and the shift to a “solution focus” is mostly superficial, like business cards that say “partner” or a new brochure.
Realizing your sales force needs to become more consultative and make a shift from selling products to selling more comprehensive, and profitable, solutions is a first step. But where do you go from there?
Every sales team will have an existing culture. By culture, I simply mean “the way we do things around here” — deeply embedded habits and behaviors that are not always easy to see, let alone change. They are embedded not just in the habits of the salespeople themselves, but in the management style, in the IT systems, in the processes and procedures, the tools people use to do their work, the training that’s available to them, the way success is measured, incentives and rewards. Everything that surrounds that salesperson is designed to optimize the old way of doing things.
If you need to make a shift to a new way, many, if not all, of those old things will need to change. This is where Culture Mapping can really help. The Culture Map is a tool that I designed with Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, the co-creators of the Business Model Canvas, the most popular and successful strategic tool for designing new business models.
The purpose of Culture Mapping is twofold:
- To discover and unravel all of those things that are barriers to effective change, but are so embedded in the existing way of doing things that they can be difficult to see clearly.
- To design and prioritize interventions and changes that will maximize the chances of successful change.
The idea behind Culture Mapping is that the best people to think throughthe potential roadblocks, as well as the tools, resources, systems and incentives that will be necessary elements of the shift, are the people who will be doing the work. When people are involved in designing the change, they become more committed and engaged in making it happen, and the chances for success increase dramatically.
It also sends a strong message from leadership: We are in this together.
Here’s how it works:
First, we identify the groups that need to change. Often this is not just the sales team but includes other groups, like product teams, marketing, delivery teams, logistics, and so on, as well as teams and individuals from the customer side.
Next, a Culture Mapping team schedules a series of 90-minute sessions, one session with each group. It’s important that these groups are teams that alrady know each other and work together on a regular basis.
The thinking behind this is that we want people to share real information — in a sense this is a constructive complaining and designing session. These meetings are with the teams and not the bosses. The purpose of these meetings is to understand the cultural blockers and enablers which often being reinforced, intentionally or unintentionally, by management.
The output of each session is a simple document that describes the current and desired outcomes, behaviors, enablers and blockers for that particular group. The sessions provide clear links between management actions, incentives and business structures and business results. They also provide recommended management actions and clear reasons and linkages that demonstrate why these actions will be likely to deliver the desired results.
Culture is simply “the way people do things around here.” If the way you do things needs to change, then Culture Mapping is the best way to identify the blocks that need to be removed and the enablers that need to be put in place, to make that change not only possible, but positive, exciting, and energizing.
Change of this kind isn’t easy, but it is necessary, if you want to meet the challenges of today’s volatile and rapidly-shifting sales environment.
