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| English: Business Process Reengineering Cycle (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
What is the sales team’s biggest problem? Prospects who don’t buy.
What is the sales team’s second biggest problem? Not enough support resources.
Where can sales managers most improve the efficiency of sales operations?
Stop investing scarce support resource on customers who don’t buy.
That sounds nice and simple. Unfortunately it isn’t.
Saving support resources for the prospects who are going to buy would be a good idea, if only we knew which ones they were. That would be nice, wouldn’t it, but we won’t hold our breath waiting for that day to come around.
The entire concept of the sales funnel is based on compiling a list of people who might buy, and then pushing the same story at them, in the hope that some of them actually will. And that means spending scarce sales, and support, resource on people who aren’t going to buy.
Maybe the answer lies in reengineering the thinking?
How about we figure out which prospects will buy with Qualification, and then invest our scarce resource on making sure they do?
That can’t be too difficult, provided we’ve worked out our strategy, and processes, and a feedback loop telling us where what we’re doing isn’t working so we can change it, so it does.
Inevitably, the reengineering needs to start with sales managers who have to unlearn what they know about sales operations and learn about management.
Then the reengineering needs to change the bosses, so the business can start selling what customers are buying, instead of telling the sales force to get customers buying what the business is selling.
Last, but far from least, the sales team needs to do things differently. The guys need to evolve from hunters into traders – not gunslingers with an attitude, but business people with a proposition.
Why doesn’t the traditional approach to selling and sales management work so well any more? What can the modern sales professional do to stay relevant in today’s customer driven markets? Check out our eBook Reengineering Sales Management for ideas on how to embrace the new order of customer driven buyer/seller relationships.
