Last Updated on 04/01/2010
I was recently asked a series of probing questions by an executive who was showing all the signs of having thought deeply and broadly about some of the sales issues of the day.
What can we do to increase our sales when we are doing all the right things?
With so few new opportunities out there how do we compel a potential client to abandon their existing solution?
What can we do to increase the favourable response rate to the RFPs we fill out? Not filling them out is not an option and the client refuses to speak with us beforehand!
A good discussion ensued from there. And the more we talked the more I knew that something is missing from the discussion. The missing element: a needed paradigm shift.
A good example of this is Salesforce.com. They were not the first to introduce a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Platform As A Service (PAAS) to the market. For those honours think Siebel, Maximizer or Clarify and Amazon and its ‘elastic computing’ respectively. Yet, Salesforce was the brave company that decided to broadly commercialize a new model in delivery for the CRM. Salesforce.com is still around, but Siebel was sold off to Oracle, Clarify to Nortel and so forth. Is your company/process/sales pitch/demonstration/methodology brave enough to break itself down in order to rebuild?
When is the time to do so? At the height of your success.
If the Requests For Proposal (RFP) are not garnering their fair share of positive responses then perhaps the paradigm shift includes not answering these requests. Many companies have instituted a policy of not responding to RFxs. Why? A hands-off paper-based abstract is not a substitute for understanding your client’s needs and specific requirements. The prospect that denies you this understanding and two-way discussion is probably neither a good client nor will end up buying from you. Are you brave enough to better utilize your own resources?
A partnership, after all, requires two parties conversing, understanding and exchanging information. A buyer/seller relationship is a partnership.
If the customer is always right, then it might be prudent to listen to the manifest actions and reactions of the customer if the old way of doing things is not working.
Between 1908 and 1927 Ford became the world’s biggest automobile manufacturer with its Model T. It had the best workers, the best benefits and sold over 15,000,000 cars. GM took over next. These companies had to lose their coveted status and billions of dollars before they began to reluctantly take action. Shouldn’t they have begun reengineering themselves before disaster hit?
