The Internet made the business world go all weird, in ways that nobody expected. Probably the weirdest thing that happened was the transformation of product selling into consultative selling. It totally blindsided the conventional wisdom of the business pundits and made all of them look like fools. And it’s created incredible new opportunities for the sales pros who “get” it…
Back in the dot-com days, when the business world was first assessing the potential impact of Internet, the catch-phrase was “frictionless commerce.” The idea was that customers (both businesses and consumers) would use the Internet to do their own product research and then order what they wanted online — without needing a “middleman,” specifically a sales rep. Under that way of thinking, a sales rep was simply a conduit for providing product information and then writing up an order — and thus eminently replaceable with web technology.
As I heard it put at one “new economy” conference: “The sales rep is a thing of the past!” Yeah, right. Give me a break!
Something completely happened. Rather than going the way of the milkman, the B2B sales rep became more essential than ever before. Customers quickly found that while they could indeed do their own research on the web, such research generally entailed becoming an expert in whatever was to be ordered. The customer had to learn the internal lingo of the product category, understand subtle differences between product features, learn to identify hidden costs, and so forth.
That’s plenty of extra work when the product in question is some random consumer item, but B2B products and services are often extremely complicated. Few B2B customers want to take the time and effort — on top of running their own business — to learn the detailed ins and outs of every product and service that they need in order to run their business. “In today’s business world, companies want to outsource everything they can and focus on their core competence,” explains Howard Stevens, CEO of The Chally Group, a company that researches best sales practices.
In other words, selling isn’t selling any longer — it’s an outsourcing service. Rather than being an information provider/order taker, the sales rep must now be capable of managing segments of the customer’s business that the customer prefers not to manage directly. In effect, the B2B customer wants the sales rep to become a contract employee who paid not with a salary but as the result of the successful fulfillment of whatever function that the customer wants to outsource.
Therefore, to be successful in B2B sales, you need to become THE manager of THAT segment of your customers’ businesses. Here’s a summary of what’s changed:
SELLING (PRE-INTERNET):
- Assume customers know basically what product or service they want.
- Provide information proving your offerings are superior to the others.
- Build relationship so that customer trusts that the information is valid.
- Close sale, write the order, follow-up on delivery, ask for more business.
SELLING (POST-INTERNET):
- Assume customers are too swamped to know what’s needed.
- Build relationship so that the customer trusts you to deliver.
- Remove confusion from the welter of conflicting information.
- Take ownership of that segment of the customer’s business.
In other words, rather than making the sales rep obsolete, the Internet has created conditions that have made sales reps far more important.
However, in order to play that more exalted role, sales reps need to change they way they behave, and the companies that employ them need to change the way that they train, support and compensate. This is no small matter, so I’m going to spend an entire week giving you the keys to the kingdom.
Tomorrow, rule #1, which is so blindingly obvious that most companies are totally blind to it.
