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Seduced by Tools and Processes

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One of my favorite newsletters comes on Sunday mornings from Andy Paul. It’s called The Weekly Sales Fix. (He also does a great weekly podcast). While he focuses mostly on large B2B sellers, his thoughts this week mirror what I’ve also been seeing in smaller B2C marketers. 

The overall thought is an over-reliance on tools and processes.

First, Andy’s take on it:

I’ve been in sales for 4 decades….

We’ve all read about the various research findings that paint a dismal picture of the state of B2B sales. 

Low quota attainment rates. Falling close rates. Increased ‘No Decision’ rates. Buyers saying they find no value in their interactions with sales reps.

However, I believe that the fundamental reason these problems exist is that we have taken our eyes off the ball.

Too many in sales are trying to substitute process, methodology and technology for the fundamental and irreplaceable human connections that are at the heart of the B2B sales transaction.

The true science of selling is not about metrics. It’s about the science of mastering the human to human interaction.

Unfortunately, sales people today aren’t being sufficiently educated about the human element of sales.

The more time I spend in sales, and the more time I invest in working to help other sales people, the more clearly I’ve come to see that the keys to success at any level in our profession are directly tied to mastering a small handful of basic human behaviors.

Be human.

Ask great questions.

Listen slowly.

Deliver value.

You can make it more complicated than this. But, why would you?

Because, no matter what sales process, technology or methodology you utilize, your ability to win ultimately boils down to mastering those four behaviors to build functional and effective relationships with your buyers.

Simplicity.

Well said, Andy. Now let me apply those same thoughts to what I’ve been seeing on the smaller business side. 

I get (and I bet many of you do too) a lot of emails and LinkedIn requests that completely ignore Andy’s advice. 

  • Someone sends me a LinkedIn request; they look interesting, so I accept. Within hours, I get a message telling me about their services and suggesting a call or a meeting.
  • Someone sends me an email – it says a bit about their services, but absolutely nothing about me or my business, much less why I might be interested. Worse, they assert that they’re relevant and can help me. Worse still, they suggest a call or a meeting to explore how they can help me.

The Seductiveness of Tools and Processes

On the B2B side, the sheer power and connectedness of today’s CRM-and-related systems is impressive. As with all tech, things are getting digitized and interconnected. You can track and link to virtually unlimited amounts of things, including your own (automated) ‘content’ and customers’ responses.

The seduction is this: the belief that Because You Can, Therefore You Should. 

  • On the B2B side, because you can micro-identify potential buyers, their past behaviors, their likely interests, and monitor their reactions to anything you might put out, therefore you should do all the above. 

No, you shouldn’t. Because as Andy Paul points out, the approach touches precisely zero of the four factors Andy calls “keys to success.”

  • On the smaller business side, the seduction is that because you can easily invite me to join you on LinkedIn or ID me on a targeted mailing list and send me the equivalent of your brochure at zero cost, therefore you should do all the above. 

No, you shouldn’t. Because if your response to an invitation acceptance is to send me a pitch, you’re committing the business equivalent of asking for sex on the first date. It’s just not done. It’s rude. 

Worse, it pretty much doesn’t even work. The law of large numbers won’t help you.  If your strategy was to micro-target desirable buyers with all your great screening tools, then offensiveness actually backfires on you: not only is the potential market smaller, but your bad reputation spreads more thoroughly.      

Whether you’ve been seduced by processes or by tools, you are 

a. Not being human

b. Not asking great (any?) questions

c. Not listening slowly (if at all)

d. Not delivering value 

With great tech comes great temptation: Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. As Andy says, keep it simple, and keep it human.

Relationship Inflation

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photo“Now our global sales team can create customer relationships instantly from anywhere.”

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of YELP, in an ad for the Salesforce1 Mobile App in the Economist.

“Run your business from your phone,” the ad goes on to say. Including the instant creation of customer relationships, with just a click.

Of course, we get what it means. Salesforce is a powerful tool; I use it. We’ve even got our own app on Salesforce for Trust-based Selling (and are proud of it).

But let’s just pause a moment and note the grade inflation that has come about with the use of the word “relationship.”

Relationship Inflation

Never mind the dictionary. Just use your own built-in definitions. What does the word “relationship” mean, and what does it suggest when we use it as synonymous with something clickable?

This is not a Luddite rant – I love my CRM-flavored apps as much as anyone. And I’m not going to bemoan the demise of deep connection at the hands of social media.

But I am going to protest the casual use of a rich word in ways that flatten and cheapen its meaning.

Dimensions of Relationships

When we think of relationships, we naturally think in two dimensions – depth and breadth. There is the sense of connection, empathy, shared knowledge, and the promise of more to come. That’s the deep part, and the deep part adds value.

The breadth part is equally important – because it shares value. The plural of relationship is network. Relationships times depth equals shared value.

The problem comes when we over-emphasize one dimension to the exclusion of another. The digital explosion has enabled both.  The ability to quickly scan and dive deep into data, or to quickly access past experiences (think your email history, think LinkedIn) can greatly help on depth.

But the emphasis in many ways has been far more on the breadth side of things. When zero marginal cost meets an ethos that says more followers/clicks/eyeballs are always better, that’s where the qualitative gets run out of town by the quantitative.  Deep gets beat by broad.

The Cost of Breadth at all Costs

When the intersection of Deep Street and Broad Street gets paved over by an expansion into Broad Boulevard, we lose something. The value of what we’re sharing diminishes. That means less value, less insight, less impact, less connection, less meaning.

In the world of sales, it’s no accident that we’re hearing about the power of insight – we’re starved for insight in a world that has been bingeing on breadth.  In the world of content, it’s no accident that we’re seeing an explosion of (often fairly good) TV programming enabled by online broadcast capabilities; we’ve been starved for it.

We need both dimensions for balance. Lately we’re out of balance, and it’s the deep content side that needs redressing.

Loyalty Programs Shoot Selves in Foot

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I have for some years now followed a UK newsletter called the Wise Marketer, which does a pretty thorough job (or so it seems to me) of covering the world of loyalty programs. 

Loyalty programs are generally thought of as having been invented in the 1970s by the airlines (particularly American Airlines, I believe—someone confirm?). They have always had a dual purpose: to reward and encourage exclusive buying behavior, and to provide a source of data about buying behavior.

They have also generated a new approach to marketing, one aimed at tapping a latent desire for status among many consumers. An anthropologist would be fascinated by the psychology and behaviors of, say, management consultants around the airport gates and airline clubs. Certainly companies have spent a great deal of money on these programs, trying to make their program distinct in their ability to confer status and prestige.

So this paragraph in the most recent newsletter made me raise my eyebrows:

Clearly, the loyalty market has reached a state of maturity in the airline, hotel and car rental industries, with very few such loyalty programmes today being able to claim genuine competitive differentiation. Simply matching the proposition offered by the competition is not enough to create lasting customer loyalty. When all programmes within a sector are basically the same (e.g. they all have online enrolment, an award chart, a welcome bonus, double miles promotions, and so on), customers tend to react with indifference. 

This isn’t really new; I remember hearing ‘customer loyalty in the airline business is about 20 minutes,’ 15 years ago. But it’s jarring nonetheless, because if one of the primary purposes of a marketing program is to differentiate the company, and the net result of several decades of that program is to eliminate differentiation among the companies—well, that’s a marketing poster child case for foot-shooting, isn’t it?

Michael Porter pointed out something similar years ago: the tendency to seek out industry ‘best practices’ is anti-strategic. That’s because even if the practice is ‘best,’ if everyone does it—then no one is strategically different. And part of the essence of strategy is to be distinct.

I’m a little bemused by all this, because the term ‘loyalty’ has long been abused in business. ‘Loyalty’ implies an intensely personal relationship, and what ‘loyalty programs’ have devolved to is anything but personal.

Ironically, the one thing in today’s business world that truly is differentiable is also that which is truly personal. You can copy someone else’s programs, policies and procedures—but you can’t copy their relationships. Those are sui generis, unique. 

Back in the early 1990s one of the truly prescient business books of our time was published: The One to One Future, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. It made the very sound observation that technology would allow us to combine scale and customization, at the individual human level. Market segmentation would max out—at a one-to-one level.

I remember being very excited to hear that insight. This was around the same time that Loyalty was being talked about by Fred Reichheld and people at Harvard Business School. Connecting the dots back then would have suggested that the way to successful companies would be to create great relationships, which then resulted in loyal feelings, behavior, etc.

What’s happened, of course, is not that at all. We have succeeded instead in publicizing the private, trivializing the profound, and pretty much turning the potential of one-to-one relationships into a cacophony of mechanical, status-climbing must-haves. Think platinum cards, ring-tones, ‘how’m-I’-doing’ online CSR surveys. 

The irony is: at a time when every loyalty program looks alike, when ‘personal’ service is mechanized, and when everyone is a VIP—that’s the very time at which truly personal, one-to-one relationships really stand out. They are even more differentiable than ever, because most companies have forgotten what that really means.

Dare to be real. You might be shocked to find out how much your customers like it.  

Why Your Sales Process Is Bad for Sales

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At a holiday party this weekend, I chatted with two friends about life at their companies.

Each has been around long enough to see several generations of approaches to selling. We seemed to notice a few things in common.

1. The term “sales approach” has increasingly come to mean a “sales management process;”

2. Which means selling has come to be seen as a business process, not as a human interaction;

3. The “management” of selling has come to mean box-checking and numbers-tweaking, much like an engineer might summarize the readings from a series of flow-meters;

4. A major objective of these processes seems to be forecasting. Yet forecasts themselves are often ignored on the upside because of the risks of hiring, and on the downside because of the cost to people of short-term firings.

Which begs the obvious question, why are we doing this?

Of course this is just anecdotal party chatter—but it rings true to me.

Sales is one business area (others include HR and purchasing) that has been hit by a case of physics-envy: the belief that quantitative analysis of physical behavior at a micro-scale holds the key to understanding business performance (and the meaning of life to boot).

Google “sales management” and look at all the process models—CRM systems, sales force automation, lead tracking, right-pointing chevron graphics—that pop up.

The message? Selling is nothing more than a simple business process. Identify leads, screen-call-screen-meet-screen them, question them, trial-close them, identify/answer objections, repeat trial-close, repeat as necessary, close. Return to start.

Identify the steps at a sufficiently detailed level, then just collect enough data, and you too can be selling, or better yet, managing the poor slobs who actually have to slap shoe leather. Just follow the steps in the order given. Paint by numbers. Connect the dots. Just do it.

Got a sales problem? It must be a process problem, which means—you must have the wrong sales process—time to switch processes! You need consultative selling, or power-based selling, or buyer decision analysis selling. You need data. Analysis. Tweak the process.

It’s easy to caricature this approach, harder to describe just what’s wrong with it. But here’s a shot.

Selling is not at root, despite what web-searches will tell you, about process. It is about people and relationships and trust. We are in most cases far, far past the point of significant value-add by linking systems. And in getting there, we have run roughshod over the value-add by human connections.

Companies are driven by vision of linking all that data so they know just what to pitch you and me—to decrease time-to-“you-want-fries-with-that?” Most customers would gladly trade some Big Brother capability for less time on-hold and more genuine concern about our wants.

Why this obsession with metrics, behaviors and processes? Like I said, physics-envy. For over a century, many academic disciplines—including business, more recently—have had a case of “physics-envy.”

They believe that only “real” data is meaningful, only particles and precision make for real “science.” Neuro-fill-in-the-blank is just the latest manifestation.  Sociologists have had physics-envy for years, as did MIT’s Business School.  Harvard used to be immune, but caught it as well a few decades back.

Hey—sales is still the fulcrum point of the commercial interaction between a buyer and a seller.  Somewhere in there humans still lurk.  Sales process descriptions leave something out. Sort of like writing about the physics of love.  Neither quite gets at the point.