Latest findings from the world of Sales Transformation

I recently had the opportunity to MC and attend the “Optimising the Sales Force Conference – OSF2010 (website delete)” which was the follow up to the inaugural OSF2009. Building on last year’s success, this year’s conference was attended by over 120 high level sales leaders across Australia. Once again I was privileged to be part of the panel of international and local experts presenting on this year’s topic, Sales Transformation.

This was the second time in Australia that we have had the opportunity to come together as a profession and share ideas and discuss important matters moving forward, and from the looks of it, we will be doing this again. The feedback from our international sales experts was that this was one of the best forums in the world. The quality of the speakers, content and discussions were of the highest standard.

Key topics included:

• Global best practice to achieve sustainable sales transformation.
• Great case studies on how to migrate your team to best practice performance and how to get a professional services firm to take on a proactive sales culture.
• What the new successful seller looks like.
• How to hire sales people who can sell.
• Using CRM to enable smart learning.
• Getting sales people effective before they achieve efficiency.
• Sales 2.0 – a Google look into the future of customers, demographics, tribes, buyer behaviours, collaboration and communication.

Key highlights and messages for me were:

1. In B2B sales, customer loyalty is heavily weighted to the experience a customer has with the sales person far exceeding brand, product and price value ratio.
2. Selling has moved beyond solving problems and satisfying needs, it’s about transforming the lives of your customers – helping them achieve results and offering accelerants which take them to their vision of success.
3. We are in ‘ideas’ businesses not ‘product’ businesses.
4. We ‘lead people to a better place’ not ‘lead with product’.
5. Sales transformation is a committed journey not an event.
6. It’s the little things that count – put real tools and processes into the hands of sales people and keep it simple, accessible and applicable.
7. Bring back the Sales Manager as trainer – we need sales managers who can train and coach; 3-5 hours per sales person per month is what is required to get sales people performing to better standards: Empower sales managers to get out from behind their desks and in the field working with their people.
8. Take a laser approach to sales training not a cannon ball approach – most sales training normally fails because it fails to address long term learning and specific learning needs. We need blended learning.
9. Sales is about reaching better standards of performance not about ‘standardisation’ – too many large organisations try to control and standardise sales performance instead of giving sales people the responsibility to achieve higher levels of performance. This requires thinking outside of the box, innovation and having a ‘challenger’ mindset – all of which are at odds with standardisation.
10. The war between ‘Urgency and Importance’ – do we want our sales people to be firefighters or builders?
11. Google’s perspective on the world of the user and the amazing views we can get from our buying and viewing habits – truly amazing presentation into the future of consumer sales.

One international speaker, an expat from Melbourne now residing in New York, said that Australia was ahead of the game when it came to connecting at a global level and understanding how to sell into different markets. He stated that we tend to be less parochial and more worldly even if our footprint is smaller per head of population. We seem to connect with more people more easily which of course bodes well for selling. On the down side, it was noted by others that our ‘tall poppy’ syndrome did not help when we came to promoting role models and shining the light on the ‘best’ in the field. We needed to honour our home grown talent and realise that what we offer here is note worthy. We need to celebrate that Australia has some great role models and be recognised as leaders in the profession of selling.

I am looking forward to OSF 2011, hope to see you there.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au