If you’re a salesperson who wants to keep both feet planted firmly in the profession, you’ll want to heed the advice of UW sales management guru Chuck West. Just don’t be surprised if he doesn’t always say what you want to hear.
The first thing he may tell you is that there’s a decent chance you’ll be looking for another line of work before the decade’s out.
| “Instead of going in and asking questions about you and your company and your challenges, I’m supposed to be smart enough and get that off the Internet and other information sources so that I can come in with an idea that will intrigue you.” — Chuck West |
In fact, says West, of the 15 million people working in sales today, fewer than 4 million will remain in the profession by 2020.
That’s a jarring statistic, but West is not exactly equating the sales profession with VCR repair or buggy-whip manufacturing. Sales will remain a viable — often adventurous — pursuit in the future, but the landscape won’t look a heck of a lot like it does today.
According to West, the program director of the Sales, Sales Management, and Advanced Management programs for Wisconsin School of Business Executive Education, the old-school consultative sales method is quickly giving way to an approach that emphasizes more high-level meetings, pre-meeting preparation, and creative, custom-made ideas pitched to clients from the get-go.
To West — who will present a seminar titled “The Future of Sales” at 9 a.m. Feb. 26 at the Alliant Energy Center — the traditional consultative sales approach, in which salespeople meet with a lower-level decision-maker and then return later with a solution, simply won’t cut it in today’s business environment.
“The consultative approach takes too long,” said West. “Going into your shop and saying, ‘Tell me what your challenges are, tell me what you need help with, tell me this and tell me that,’ and then me analyzing it and coming back and saying, ‘Well, I have some ideas; what are you guys doing in this area?’ — it’s a long conversation over a period of time. Today, people are so busy. They say, ‘If you want to see me, tell me what we’re going to talk about, lay out the agenda.’ And if it’s just to get to know each other, I’ll push that back on my priority list and say, ‘That’ll be great. Let’s see when our schedules clear and do it.’
“But if you say, ‘I’ve been thinking about your business and I know you’re challenged by X, Y, and Z, and I have a potential answer, an idea that can take X off the table,’ then I have a lot more interest in having that discussion.”
In his February workshop, which is part of the IB Seminar Series, West will focus on four elements he thinks are key to being successful in sales as the profession continues to evolve:
- Implementing a more refined account-targeting system
- Landing high-level meetings
- Researching, developing, and delivering high-value messages that connect with client top-line goals
- Developing faster and more cost-effective sales processes
In the seminar, he’ll spend time reviewing the decades-old consultative sales approach and then move into the new sales strategies and processes that are beginning to emerge — which, not surprisingly, are being developed right along with the continued ascendency of the Internet.
According to West, even as the Web is quickly becoming the conventional consultative salesperson’s biggest foe, it has the potential to be the modern salesperson’s most valued ally.
First, the bad news. The Internet is radically remaking the way people purchase products and services, even in the B-2-B arena.
As West notes, if you’re selling everyday items like books or nails or office supplies, there’s no real sales conversation anymore because people simply go online to buy what they need. And that’s where most of the shrinkage in the national sales force will occur over the next six years. When it comes to more complex B-2-B sales, the situation isn’t nearly as dire, but that doesn’t mean there won’t still be a sea change.
“We will have similar shrinkage in B-2-B, it just won’t be quite as dramatic,” said West. “So who is going to be left and what are they going to be doing? And the answer is they’re going to be the real sort of entrepreneurial salespeople of the future who show up with an idea and call on a high level — a more executive level of selling.
“So that’s where it’s going, and things that are below that level, that will be the few consultative selling jobs that remain. So it’s going to shrink, and with regard to the sales professionals of the future, the phrase that’s being bandied about is, ‘Don’t hire a salesperson anymore, hire a really good businessperson and put them in sales.’ So the profession is going to be greatly elevated in the future.”
(Continued)
Meanwhile, the Internet is quickly emerging as one of the salesperson’s most valuable tools — one that perfectly jibes with new approaches to selling.
“Instead of going in and asking questions about you and your company and your challenges, I’m supposed to be smart enough and get that off the Internet and other information sources so that I can come in with an idea that will intrigue you, or at least the discussion of an idea that would intrigue you,” said West.
Getting to know you
Of course, face time will continue to be important in the world of sales, but it may wane in importance as Web-enabled teleconferencing options become even more sophisticated.
“We will still have face-to-face meetings,” said West. “I think a lot of the follow-up meetings will be on WebEx and all the other things that we do. I have a client in Chicago that I meet with I’d say once a month for a project, but I’ll bet five times a month we have a WebEx or conference call. So even the way we treat things during the process is much quicker and requires less travel. So a lot of it is purely efficiency, and companies want to be efficient on both ends, the selling and the buying.”
Meanwhile, some of those 11 million people projected to leave the sales profession may find themselves in other, related jobs. West says that the percentage of traditional salespeople who can be effective in this brave new sales landscape is fairly low, because it’s often hard to get people who have been embedded in a particular work style for a long period of time to shift their outlook. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have a place in the organizations they work for.
“With all these non-selling jobs occurring, technical support and other things that are occurring, they may find that their skill sets work better in a different part of the organization rather than direct sales,” said West. “Direct sales will really be about charging out and getting the big accounts. Taking care of existing accounts is an activity that we cannot pay sales commission on; that’s more of what we would call a high-level customer service or technical support role. And that’s critical that those things occur, but they won’t be paid the way a commissioned salesperson who’s making bonuses and all that other stuff’s going to be paid.”
Then again, traditional salespeople with old-fashioned moxie at least have a head start when it comes to adjusting to the new paradigm.
“As organizations have become more complex, getting to a real decision-maker has become much more problematic than it was, so I think the really, really good salespeople that really embrace the new changes that are going on will be tenacious — probably most tenacious about getting the right-level meeting — and that’s not comfortable for somebody who’s been selling consultatively. They typically go in low, find out what’s going on, and work their way up, and it takes a great deal of time to make that happen. And the people who really embrace the new reality go right to the top and say, ‘This is what I think; what do you think?’ So that’s one of the biggest shifts, is the level of the sales call that’s effective today.”
If you would like to see Chuck West’s Feb. 26 IB Seminar presentation, click here for information on registration.
