Читать книгу Selling With Noble Purpose - McLeod Lisa Earle, Lisa Earle McLeod - Страница 16

I stayed the course … from beginning to the end, because I believed in something inside of me.

—Tina Turner, entertainer

Suppose you wrote the following goal on your office whiteboard: “I want to make as much money as possible.” Now suppose your clients saw it. How would they feel? How would you feel knowing that they'd seen it? Would you be proud or embarrassed?

What if you went over your prospect list, and the only thing written next to each prospect's name was a dollar figure and a projected close date? Would your prospects be happy if they saw that? Would they want to do business with you? Probably not; it reduces them to nothing more than a number. Yet that's exactly how most organizations talk about their customers on a daily basis.

Imagine a salesperson walking into a customer's office and opening the sales call by plopping a revenue forecast down on the customer's desk announcing, “I have you projected for $50,000 this month. Give me an order now!”

That rep would be thrown out in a second. Yet that's the kind of language most organizations use when they talk about their customers internally. It's like two different worlds.

Think about the typical conversation a sales manager has with his or her sales rep. It usually goes something like this:

“When are you going to close this? How much revenue will it be? Are all the key decision‐makers involved? Who's the competition? What do you need to close this deal?”

All the questions are about when and how we're going to collect revenue from the customer. These questions matter, but they aren't enough to create any kind of differentiated conversation (internally or externally).

Very few managers ask about the impact the sale will have on the customer's business or life.

We expect salespeople to focus on customers' needs and goals when they're in front of customers, but the majority of internal conversations are about the organization's own revenue quotas.

Although it's an unintended disconnect, it's a fatal one.

Unfortunately, the current sales narrative of most organizations is flawed, fatally out of sync with what really matters to salespeople and customers. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff articulates the transactional mindset that so many sales teams used to embody, describing it this way: “If you were meeting with a customer, your singular goal was to leave the room with a signed contract—in as short a time as possible.”

Benioff points out the flaw in this approach, writing in his book Trailblazer: “It didn't incentivize anyone to consider whether the customers on the other side of these transactions really needed the software or whether it helped them make progress on their business goals.”

In a traditional sales organization, the entire ecosystem surrounding the sales team—the customer relationship management (CRM) system, weekly sales meetings, conversations with managers, recognition, and everything else that influences seller behavior—are all pointed toward targets.

It's assumed that sellers will focus on customers when they're interacting with customers. But are we surprised when they don't? Everything in the ecosystem is driving them toward thinking about nothing but their own quota.

Most organizations want to have a positive impact on their customers' lives. It makes good business sense, and it appeals to our more noble instincts. Yet when managers are caught up inside the pressure cooker of daily business, their desire to improve the customer's life is eclipsed by quotas, quarterly numbers, and daily sales reports.

This results in salespeople who don't have any sense of a higher purpose other than “making the numbers.” It sounds fine enough in theory, but customers can tell the difference between the salespeople who care about them and those who care only about their bonuses. Sales targets are important, but they don't create a compelling narrative.

The great disconnect between what we want salespeople to do when they're in the field (focus on the customer) versus what we emphasize and reinforce internally (our own targets and quotas) results in mediocre sales performance.