Is your sales team adaptable and trend-ready?
Never mind the top tech trends, can your sales team actually earn the benefits, Chris Gonsalves asks
It's December and thus time to be bombarded with lists and punditry telling us all about the hot technologies we should be tracking in the new year. While these compilations can be helpful to a tech provider's growth plan, there's a better question we should all be asking ourselves:
Is my sales team ready to sell the next big thing?
This came home to me over the US Thanksgiving holiday when downtime with friends and family inevitably turned to shop talk.
One friend in particular, a successful small business owner from a neighbouring city, wanted to pick my brain about moving more of her business to the cloud - specifically migrating to Microsoft's Office 365.
Her questions were basic: "How does the fee structure work? Is it really cheaper than locally installed software? What can I do with the cloud that I can't do now?"
Her wise-beyond-his-years 14-year-old chimed in with a great question of his own: "What happens to all of your stuff if you quit the service or don't pay your bill?"
I started with my stock response. "Who does your IT?"
My friend has had a solid, mid-sized regional provider handling her IT needs for the better part of a decade.
She's in regular contact with a partner representative she considers a trusted advisor and an ally in her business. So, why does she still have so many simple questions about cloud? Why isn't her IT sales guy telling her this stuff even before she asks?
The answer is likely that the sales force at this otherwise solid tech provider is failing to adapt.
Low adaptability to market forces, technology disruptions and shifting customer needs are the biggest problems in channel sales. Instead of harnessing competitive data to move the business forward, sales personnel bury their heads and push forward with what has succeeded in the past.
The negative effects of this low-adaptability sales syndrome are featured in recent academic research with the catchy title "Gaining and leveraging customer-based competitive intelligence: the pivotal role of social capital and salesperson adaptive selling skills".
Phew.
While the title may be a mouthful, the message within is fairly simple: adapt or die.
When it comes to rapidly changing markets like technology, competitive intelligence starts at the sales-force level, where representatives are getting first-hand information about customer needs and desires along with vendor information about trendy products, price changes, marketing initiatives, et cetera.
The adaptable sales person will spin that competitive information into gold. He or she will interpret it in real time and adjust the approach accordingly to develop a trusting relationship with the customer and put sales in the position to receive even more information that can be used to advantage - a viral cycle of success.
If you guessed the converse is also true, you're correct. Low adaptability in sales not only results in stagnation, it actually creates negative forces that damage the client relationship and pull the business backwards.
"Sales people who make use of customer information for the customer's sake tend to be more successful in selling, and they get more information," writes Joël Le Bon, marketing professor at the University of Houston and one of the authors of the study. "Those who don't make good use of it find that their sources dry up. Customers ask themselves: 'Why should I share any more information with that rep?'"
Le Bon describes successfully adaptive sales people as engaging in "extra-role behaviours" that focus on long-term customer satisfaction and place the customer's needs first while "actively endeavouring to develop solutions that enable the customer to reach its goals".
"In the context of this type of high-trust relationship, a customer would be willing to divulge proprietary information picked up from another supplier's rep," Le Bon writes. "But that's not to say customers release information just to be nice. They provide knowledge in the expectation of some sort of benefit. They might expect the salesperson who receives it to offer better terms, for example, or to provide greater levels of effort and commitment."
And on the other side of this shiny coin? Nothing good.
Sales forces with low adaptability hurt themselves with the competitive information they acquire. They just don't respond to it, Le Bon says, either because they don't care enough to use it or they're unable to.
When that happens, customers end up with an overall negative impression of the provider's products and services. And the downward spiral begins; bad relationships lead to less information leads to poor market positions.
"Companies with poor information about competitors are stuck being reactive, lurching from defensive tactic to defensive tactic as new products appear, seemingly out of nowhere," writes Le Bon.
"In the wrong hands, competitive intelligence can have a negative impact on sales and market share. So if you acquire information from customers, you'd better use it well, or it may hinder, rather than help, your sales efforts."
At least anecdotally, that's what I experienced over Thanksgiving coffee and dessert with my business-owning friend. It's pretty clear an otherwise good IT partner was failing to adapt to industry and client information that should have been obvious and might have been used to cement a relationship and improve two businesses.
Instead, my friend now has doubts about how well she is being served, and somewhere another tech provider is bemoaning the disruptive nature of cloud computing instead of embracing and adapting to it.
So before you click open the next list of Must-Have Technologies for 2014, ask yourself if your sales team knows what to do with this information. If not, you might as well turn off the PC, pick up an old history book and settle in for a long, cold winter.
Chris Gonsalves is vice president of editorial at Channelnomics
As part of our special editorial partnership, CRN is republishing this article from Channelnomics