Are your Salespeople Stupid?

Come on, admit it.

It’s what you think, isn’t it?

If I had a dollar for every time I heard “our salespeople lack the skills or ability to (insert any of the following: cross-sell, sell hig her, sell to value, get ahead of the RFP)” I would be a very rich person.

But are selling skills really the problem?

Most B2B companies today are moving to named account coverage models where a sales team has an assigned quota for revenue produced out of a given company or organization. Responsible for selling the entire product portfolio, the expectation here is that sales people will concentrate their efforts on a handful of targeted companies and grow them from $1M to $10M accounts. When it doesn’t happen, business leaders tell me the same thing, “we just don’t have the right people” or “our sales people just don’t get it”.

What’s lost in this calculus is the sheer mountain of information that sales people must manage and communicate to customers in a valuable way.

To illustrate this point, consider this example.

Assuming your company has 10 products that all can be sold by your sales force, lets try to determine how much information a salesperson must process and manage on any given account they are pursing.

10 products or solution packages	(Doesn’t factor in multiple delivery options like license terms, software as a service, co-location, etc.)
5 value propositions for each product	(50 total messages to manage and communicate in the customer’s context)
5 different buyers involved in the decision	(250 total messages and their derivatives (50 value props X 5 different points of view from different stakeholders)
10 personal and business drivers to uncover for each stakeholder	(300 different messages to manage - 5 personal + 5 business goals X 5 stakeholders = 50 stakeholder goals + 250 total messages)
5 uncovering questions for each value proposition	(1300 different messages - 5 questions to prepare for each stakeholder and value proposition + 50 different stakeholder goals)
4 competitors with 1 knockoff for each	(1,500 different messages -50 different value propositions X 4 competitors + 1,250 different messages and questions+ 50 different unique goals)
5 collateral pieces and presentations for each product or solution set	(1,550 different elements of information - 1,500 different messages + 50 different combinations of prepared content)

In this scenario, a salesperson is asked to manage over 1,500 different forms of information for each account they are responsible for.

From one view point, selling an individual product or service could be viewed as easy, but when considering the entire breadth of the portfolio, the burden is overwhelming.

So, how much information can we expect sales people to successfully work with?

Cognitive psychologist, George Miller determined human beings are bound by the “magical number of seven” which means that people have a “channel capacity” of between 5 and 9 pieces of information or “chunks” of material they can hold in their heads and reliably communicate.

Only a handful of people have the ability to examine a complex system (like a technology sale) and abstract from that environment the optimum chucks of information and create their own model to consistently manage all of these variables to drive successful outcomes. Interestingly enough, most of the new business revenue your company generates (about 80%) will come from a small minority of your sales people (about 20%). A common attribute shared by these top performers, consciously or not, is they all have developed the ability to digest relevant information and communicate it in a way that is both clear and compelling to the customer.

It’s not that salespeople are stupid; it’s just that they are human.

Go-to-market models which place the burden of managing the multitudes of information and content on the backs of individual people are doomed to fail, regardless of the talent or skill of the sales force.

Managing complexity is not a sales person problem, but rather a company problem - one which requires an integrated effort of sales, marketing, and solutions experts to successfully solve.

The first step in any customer-centered approach is to research the steps your customers go through to solve problems (not buy things) and to identify their common decision-making patterns. By understanding the intricacies of your customer’s problem-solving behavior you can create a universal framework that can help more of your sales people successfully navigate the complexity of their customer's problem-solving process while decreasing their burden and improving their ability to communicate value.

A successful customer-centered framework should:
• codify the best practices to helping your customers solve common problems, in an authentic and genuinely helpful way.
• provide a simple and repeatable way for sales people to decode that knowledge in a way that accommodates a natural conversation and isn’t canned or routine.
• be flexibly designed to enable sales people to revise the materials and collaborate with customers in response to the contingencies that arise throughout the problem-solving process.

So before blaming the intelligence or skills of your sales force, first consider the scale of the task they face and ask if they are being sent into battle with the ability to add value throughout the entire lifecycle of your customer’s problem solving process.

Comments

[Flyn Penoyer]

Though I agree with the writer that there can be significant amounts of data that salespeople need to do there jobs in a complex sale I don't think this is the major problem.

The customer is an expert, and you only need that information when the prospect says "I need ..." The most important job of the salesperson is finding out what the prospect needs. It is here the manager and the company need to focus attention. A salesperson can always go get the missing information for the prospect, but it is getting the prospect to need it that's paramount.

The solution is to give the sales team a very complete and well documented sales process that reduces the level of skill necessary to succeed thus empowering all team members to do better.

Most companies don't give salespeople such a tool and suffer both in the performance of their individuals and in the manager's ability to coach and develop team members effectively.

But my biggest beef with the post is the first and last thoughts.

Any manager that asks, or considers, or even thinks about their folks being STUPID is definitely the root of the entire problem. "It's not the salespeople stupid, it's the leader!" (That was not directed at the author.) I was never in the military, but I believe they teach this concept. In the move GI Jane, when Demi Moore is made squad leader, MasterChief says -- "Remember, there are no bad teams, just bad leaders."

As a leader you are responsible for hiring people who can do the job and training them so they can do it very well. If they aren't doing, or can't do it well, it only the fault of the leader.

It is not the scale of the problem either, it is the responsibility of leadership to give the folks what they need to be successful. You cannot and will not change the fact that there are 400 line items and 6 competitors with similar and competing products for all of them.

What you can change (and that's all that's important) is your team's preparedness. If there is any stupidity on the team it is the leader's fault -- EVERY TIME. Sorry, but the buck always stops at the top, not at the bottom of an organization!

One closing note -- it is a fact that people perform up to expectations (This has been scientifically tested time and time again.) -- if the leader has these thoughts (Stupidity) the team will feel them and will prove them true.

[Saeed Khan]

Salespeople fail, not only when their leaders fail them, as is correctly indicated by Flyn's comment above, but also when Product Management and Product Marketing fail them.

If the sales people are not equiped with the right products and tools to help them optimize the sales process, they cannot succeed. For example, you can't sell someone a bicycle if they want to buy a car. Both will get you places but they are obviously very different, appeal to different buyers with different needs.

Given the critical nature of PMs and PMMs, it always astounds me how understaffed those teams are and how many distractions they have to deal with while trying to do their jobs.

Tom, one thing that may be worth researching is how to properly staff those functions in technology companies. Not just the right skill set, but also the right size, given product types, revenue expectations, size of sales teams etc.

Saeed

[Bart Groningen, van]

At first sight, the complexity of the examples looks overwhelming. However if we take the road of hard sciences the complexity is also the key to the simplicity. That is also the way the high rolers of sales are capable of handling and managing the fast amount of information. The concept behind this is described by, physicist turned management consultant, Eliahu Goldratt as inherent simplicity. He describes it as follows: “The complexity of a system is not comprised by the amount of elements in the system, but by the lack of connections between these elements”

Let me explain it a little closer: the more connections you have between all the elements in a system the easier it is to impact the entire system. When all elements in the system are connected you should only touch one element to impact all the others. The fewer connections you have the more elements you have to “touch” in order to impact the entire system.

So selling is not complex, you don’t have to manage all the elements, you only have to connect the dots and then manage the connections.

Bart

[Tony Eyles]

Organisations can use product/service and pricing complexity as a competitive advantage if it means they can meet more specific customer needs. However, if they let the complexity impact front-line staff (e.g. expecting salespeople to hold it all in their heads) then it will have the opposite effect. Good salespeople will listen to customer needs and then respond with matching offers. Good organisations will equip them with the tools to do this accurately, quickly, and professionally.

What is "stupid" is when organisations/managers blame individuals for systemic failure.

Thanks for the post - its good to highlight this fallacy.