Читать книгу Selling With Noble Purpose - McLeod Lisa Earle, Lisa Earle McLeod - Страница 17

When the customer becomes nothing more than a number to you, you become nothing more than a number to the customer—and your entire organization suffers.

When you overemphasize financial goals at the expense of how you make a difference to customers, you make it extremely difficult for your salespeople to differentiate themselves from the competition. And the problem doesn't stop there. It has a ripple effect, causing salespeople who:

 Think only about the short term

 Fail to understand the customer's environment

 Cannot connect the dots between your products and customers' goals

 Cannot gain access to senior levels within the customer

Then the problem escalates:

 Customers view you as a commodity.

 You have little or no collaboration with them.

 Customers place undue emphasis on minor problems.

 Contracts are constantly in jeopardy over small dollar amounts.

 Salespeople's default response is to lower the price.

 Sales has a negative perception in the rest of the organization.

 Top performers become mid‐level performers.

 Salespeople view their fellow salespeople as the competition.

 Customer churn increases.

 Salespeople try to game the comp plan.

 Sales force morale declines.

It's not a pretty picture. When the internal conversation is all about money, the external conversation becomes all about money. And all of a sudden, that's the last thing you're making.

Companies have tried a variety of methods to solve this problem. Organizations spend millions on sales training programs teaching salespeople how to ask better questions and engage the customers. They spend even more millions on CRM systems to capture critical customer information. They host off‐site retreats to create mission and vision statements. They hire expensive consultants to craft lengthy slide decks articulating their value proposition.

The results are short‐lived at best. Salespeople abandon the training the minute a high‐stakes deal is on the table. No one updates the customer intel in CRM. The mission and vision are put on a meaningless placard in the lobby. And the value story is reduced to a bunch of pretty slides that sound just like everyone else's.

The reason these solutions don't deliver sustained improvement is because they address only the symptoms. They don't tackle the root cause: the lack of purpose.

Peter Drucker, widely considered the most influential management thinker in the second half of the twentieth century, famously said, “Profit is not the purpose of a business but rather the test of its validity.”

I'll take that a step further: Driving revenue is not the purpose of a sales force; it's the test of its effectiveness.

If you want to create a differentiated sales team, you have to point them toward a different target. Instead of pointing your team toward a number, which is likely what your competition is doing, point your team toward a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP).

A Noble Sales Purpose is a definitive statement about how you make a difference in the lives of your customers. It speaks to why you're in business in the first place. Used correctly, your NSP drives every decision you make and every action you take. It becomes the underpinning for all your sales activities.

For example, one of our clients provides IT services for small businesses. Their NSP is simply, “We help small businesses be more successful.” It's not elaborate or sexy or poetic. Instead, it's clear and effective. It drives everything they do. Every decision, large or small, must pass through that filter: “Will this help us make small businesses more successful?” If the answer is no, they don't do it. Every new product and service they create—every sales call—is focused on how they can make their customers' small businesses more successful. You'll read more about how this team used their NSP to drive a decade worth of growth later in the book.

For now, notice how this simple statement goes beyond the standard value proposition or product description. It doesn't include “and our community” or “through our values like integrity and hard work” or anything like that. It's simple. And clear. That's why it works.

Their NSP describes the impact they aim to have on customers. It serves as the North Star for the organization.

The leadership team first began implementing their NSP in 2009, during the height of the recession. In a tough economy, when customers were cutting back on outside IT services, the NSP approach helped the company post double‐digit sales growth. While other firms were descending into transactional sales to get business, they stayed true to their NSP and won clients away from competitors. As the economy improved, their NSP drove even more growth. Their reputation grew, and their customers became their best sales ambassadors.

Profits are the result of your work, not the sole purpose of your efforts.

The evidence tells us that purpose is the secret to driving more revenue. As one of my favorite purpose colleagues, Roy Spence—who has worked in the purpose space for decades—says, “Purpose is your reason for being; [it] goes beyond making money, and it almost always results in making more money than you ever thought possible.”

An NSP approach can be counterintuitive for leaders schooled in a “managing to the money” style. For some, it's almost heresy. Yet the results speak for themselves.

Our client Doug Williams, the CEO of Atlantic Capital Bank, articulated it best when he said, “I've realized I need to manage to the numbers, but I need to lead to the Noble Purpose.” Later in the book, you'll read about how Williams and his team used their NSP—“We fuel prosperity”—to transform their organization, grow income from continuing operations by 81%, and be voted a Best Place to Work based on anonymous employee surveys. Eighteen months after they began their Noble Purpose journey, Williams was on the cover of American Banker Magazine as one of the top bankers in America for his team's remarkable turnaround.

An NSP drives more revenue than financial goals alone because an NSP taps into a human instinct even more powerful than our desire for money.