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Everything about the way we sell is becoming extinct.
Our selling styles, our training, in fact, our whole industry is built on outmoded tools that create passive salespeople. We are reactors:
Waiting to be told what to do
Reacting to crisis orders
Responding to demands for solutions
Following our clients’ lead and simply complying with their wishes
We are passengers versus pilots
Now, don’t get me wrong, those skills were necessary, once-upon-a-time when the industry was composed of salespeople who simply knew where to source products. But our time as finders-of-product (only) is over. The client, with a mouse click, can find anything they want. The winners, those who evolve, will become creators:
Creating demand
Identifying solutions for our clients before being asked
Leading our clients to reimagine how promotional products can solve problems
Forcing ourselves to the table as experts rather than sourcing houses
Pilots who have a clear mission and the skill to guide clients to success
But in order to do this, we must fix the biggest problem confronting us today, our defunct selling methods.
Just how outdated are our selling skills and our industry?
In the article, “Why Women Are the Future of B2B Sales,” Harvard Business Review stated that although women make up just over half of the college-educated workforce, they hold less than one-third of the B2B sales jobs today.
Even beyond diversity (which we all know is desperately needed in this industry), why is the Harvard Business Review claiming that women are the future of successful selling?
For the future buyer (read: modern buyer), “Salespeople need capabilities for collaborating with customers and shaping solutions. These capabilities focused on addressing customer needs, have become more important for sales success than persuasion capabilities, such as influencing customers and driving outcomes. And this plays to women’s strengths.”
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These were once known as “soft skills” in selling. The so-called “strong” sales skills: convincing through personality and charm and meeting quotas over the primacy of values and intention are residual habits left over from the Mad Men world of yesterday. (They never really were “soft skills,” that’s just the binary phrase fabricated by a male dominant salesforce).
Does this mean we should fire ⅔ of our male workforce? No. But it does mean a complete reimagining of our sales team and the skills required to make one successful, plus a radical overhaul of sales training (which virtually nothing like this exists in our industry, but stay tuned).
If you need more convincing, it’s not just one Harvard Business Review article, but study after study reveals that clients are demanding similar key attributes from you as a salesperson. In one recent study produced by Forrester research, the very first point made about what B2B wants from salespeople is called the “Seller Imperative.” Clients demand that you “increase your research skills, become more knowledgeable about their challenges and industry, and demonstrate a deep understanding of the buyer and their needs.”
Your ability to know where to source product, how to react to an emergency, and vast product knowledge, are baseline skills. The client assumes you possess these skills already, what they are telling you is they demand something more. The four essential skills you need to work on for a successful future are:
Research/Inquiry
Empathy, foresight (guided by research)
Omnichannel fluency (more on that in a minute)
Leadership
But in order for us to do this, let’s talk about that big, ugly four-letter word….
Ask yourself: As a salesperson, how much of your time this week was spent on researching your customer, learning about their industries and challenges, expanding your knowledge about their infrastructure, and asking the hard questions about their future?
0% of your time? 5% of your time? 10%?
And how much of your time was spent sourcing products, preparing quotes, reacting to a crisis, and wrangling with admin details over an order already in play?
50% of your time? 75%? 90%?
Those little tasks, the sourcing, quoting, admin work, are the tasks that will make you, as a salesperson, extinct.
If study after study proves that client research, empathy, foresight, and leadership are the primary success factors for the future (those are leading skill sets, looking out the front windshield) and you’re spending more time on product research, quoting, and admin details (those are lagging skills, rear-window view only), you’re about to be left in the dust.
The new skills require a massive overhaul of how we spend our time because this requires a new skill most of us have yet to develop as promo sales pros: the skill of deep thinking.
Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, defined the current work that most of us as salespeople are now engaged in as “shallow work.”
“Shallow work is non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”
The deep work of research and understanding is the new skillset required today, which is where we must now invest our time. Newport wrote, “The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”
Another key skill the Forrester research study revealed was communication fluency. The study said you must be “fluent in every interaction channel that the buyer wants to use to engage, and you must thrive in digital-first scenarios.”
The Mad Men selling model was built around taking buyer-buddies to play golf, after-hours drinks, or delivering donuts to the whole office with a smile. And our sales presentations revolved around the product: passing around soft garments for customers to feel, gushing over the newest, coolest promo toy (goodbye-for-good fidget spinner), or revealing “newest, latest” products (which is always kinda laughable when you consider that there are nearly a million products in this industry, 90% of which are “new” to every buyer).
I’m not suggesting that the product isn’t important, it’s vital. We are an industry built by product. But we’ve become product obsessed to the point that it supersedes solving problems first.
COVID, for all its calamity and heartbreak, ushered us into a new era of communication, the era of the video conference call. The buyer has an urgent demand for digital tools that remove friction in the buying process, and moreover, the buyer carries a great deal of uncertainty regarding new problems. COVID isn’t the reason for the shift in demand, this demand was growing with buyers, but it is the catalyst that requires us to think differently about how we present ourselves, how we communicate, and mostly, which solutions we provide to the client.
Virtual meetings will require the salesperson to be more consultative, arrive with answers, and provide real solutions. Think less free donuts and free samples and more ideas. It’s just a small example of how salespeople need to think in order to win the hearts and minds of buyers in the future. The future won’t all be virtual but you can bet on this: the stakes for in-person meetings are now higher, and with Zoom fatigue being a real thing, you need to show up prepared to solve and not shill and earn your client’s respect (i.e., time) by providing answers to problems.
As the world reawakens from its COVID-stupor and the economy climbs out of its temporary coma, our goal should be to not waste this crisis. We need to see the world as it is quickly changing so that we can become agents of change rather than victims of change.
The future salesperson who wins in the new world of work will be the one who makes clients’ lives easier. They will lead their clients by finding solutions to problems before they arise. They will arrive for sales calls with intelligent answers to difficult questions, and mostly, understand the environment in which their client operates, deeply enough to add true value.
Crisis (the root word) means a decisive moment, a turning point. It denotes separation and a decision. Be mindful that this moment in history is pivotal for us as salespeople. We can no longer afford to cling to the comfort of old selling habits or our buyers and the world will pass us by, we should use it to its fullest potential for our own transformation.
This post is the third installment in a new series on the future of work. We began by discussing the disruption we’ve all feared has finally arrived and then the four demands the client of the future wants from you now.
You can now download the complete Future of Work eBook in a free, easy to read, downloadable PDF. Click here to get your copy!