I recently met with a VP at a Fortune 100 company that said his CEO demanded he reduce his spend on people and increase his spend on technology. This was an executive order.
By 2030, 73 Million US workers (out of 166 Million) will be displaced by automation according to McKinsey research.
Most of these job displacements will happen in industries like retail, food, and machinists, but Gartner is now predicting that by 2025, 80% of all sales interactions will be digital. And Forrester predicted the end of the B2B salesman.
That’s the one that hits home for me. As a sales professional, I always thought this career would be protected, but it will be changed forever.
To make sure I have continue to be successful and relevant in the next few decades, my number one goal is to create trust with customers. According to one recent podcast at about the 19:00 mark with Will Barron, trust is the number one thing that separates a BOT from a HUMAN in sales.
I can build trust with customers by becoming a better quarterback of the customer experience, honing in on my personal board of advisors, and becoming an expert in my customer’s domain.
Be the Quarterback of the customer experience I can’t control
Its inevitable that most of the customer experience will be done online on avenues I don’t control as a salesperson. Rather than try and ignore this fact, I’ve made it my goal to quarterback my customer’s experience, especially when I don’t have the ball. Here are the elements of the customer experience I can’t fully control that I try and quarterback for my customers:
- 1st Party Data Assets: Any company I work for will have a website, email marketing, social channels, service tickets, etc. This is their 1st party data, an asset the brand owns but rarely uses well. I’ve made it my goal to quarterback these experiences for customers, so they aren’t wasting their time on dated, false, or negative information. This means I have to be in sync with the email cadences in play from marketing, service issues, or any other push notifications that may come to my customer. I’m maniacal about knowing everything that company and person is getting from my company and the entire historical relationship with my brand. I need to have as little surprises as possible and quarterback the robots that own all this first party data.
- Customer Community Connections: The brands I sell for will have user communities and other customers who also want the product to grow and improve. By connecting my customer to these other customers and communities, I build incredible trust and open doors for cross-sells and upsells I could have never imagined.
- Post-Buying Process: Many salespeople, software sellers especially, sell their deal and leave. Purchasing can be confusing and difficult, so I try and quarterback expectations not only for buying process, but also for the post-sale interactions. When will they receive the next invoice? Who can they go to with questions? What are typical response times from collections and billing teams? How are service escalations handled? The clearer I can be about the resources available to the customer, the less surprises they will have in the future, and the easier future sales will be.
- 3rd Party Thought Leadership: Its been well documented that most of the sales process happens on review sites and internet searches. I proactively try and provide as much 3rd party research to my ideas and product as I can. By proactively providing the links for the relevant ideas, I not only guide the customer to where I want them to go, but I also hone in better on my messaging to ensure I am guiding towards what is best for the customer.
Curate Amazing Mentors
If “Uncertainty will replace stability as skills become obsolete”, then having a personal board of advisors is more important than ever.
To ensure my career is future-proof, having mentors that are invested in my future is critical, says John Schwarz, former IBM and SAP executive. If a mentor gives me advice, and I follow it exactly as they say, they will be invested in ensuring it works for me and that I succeed.
I’ve put together a personal board of advisors that I go to when I need advice or need to strengthen my vision. I work hard to bring them value as much as I can whether that is information from the front lines of sales and work, a current trend I’m hearing about, or just the ability to write out the advice they gave for their own records.
Get Beyond Price
Sales is about being an expert in the customer’s domain. If I know my customer’s domain, I can educate them and help them buy the right solution.
My sales domain is marketing and advertising, so I’m doing everything I can to be an expert in my customer’s domain. The more I know my customer’s domain, the more value I can bring to them, and the more I can elevate the conversation beyond price.
One of my customers is a large B2B enterprise. Typically, pricing was exclusively handled by high-paid sales reps. However, they have taken a strategy to put all pricing right on their website. This enraged their sales reps because the rep no longer had the power over the customer. What sales didn’t realize is that the customer has long had this ability to empower themselves with this pricing information because of digital and social technologies. Salespeople were just behind the game.
The lesson here is that the price of a product actually has little to do with the sales profession. The more I can be an expert in the customer’s domain, the more I will create trust and elevate the sales conversation beyond price.
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Joshua Ballantine 