Well, well… My recent post about sales process appears to have offended some of the old guard, specifically David Kurlan, author of "Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball". He left a comment on my initial post here on BNET detailing his objections to a customer-centric approach.
I'll get to Kurlan's complaints in a minute, but before doing so, I can't help but comment on the expanded version of his criticism, which he posted in his own blog. Just so we're all on the same page, here's an excerpt from his blog entry, as it appeared on 4/10:
"Give me a break. Another blogger is trying to convince you that your selling process is obsolete… Geoffrey James, a freelance writer and author, but not a sales expert, has recently written about this subject and I strongly disagree with what he wrote."
Golly! I assumed that a decade in high tech sales and marketing, followed by a decade of writing about sales and marketing (a process that's involved being personally coached by dozens of top sales trainers) and a career (freelancing) where if I don't sell, I don't eat qualified me to blog about sales. Apparently not, at least according to Kurlan. I guess I'll have to follow in his footsteps and join the Association of Self-Appointed Sales Experts (ASASE) by sending in an application along with my two-cents, which I believe is the lifetime membership fee.
Anyway, let's deconstruct Kurlan's comments to show how they exhibit the kind of thinking that alienates customers:
Point 1 - While many products and services are simply being bought, not sold, there are still a great number of products and services that are and will continue to be sold. These include complex products and services as well as high-priced products and services and customized products and services.
Response: Customers buy commodities at their own pleasure, usually on the web, with sales reps no longer necessary. Customers also buy highly complex offerings without being sold them, but only after somebody with expertise has defined the elements of a complex solution. This can be an internal expert, an independent consultant, or (if you're lucky) a sales consultant. In both cases, the customer is buying. Any offering that needs to be "sold" — without a customer already having a need or goal — is simply a waste of time. Or a con job.Point 2 - While it's important to consider how the customer wishes to be sold, a salesperson can't abandon a selling process while the customer/prospect uses one salesperson against the other to commodities [sic] the offering. The salesperson still requires a road map and my process, introduced in Baseline Selling, identifies points in time, as opposed to sequential steps.
Response: If a customer can turn what you're selling into a commodity, it's a commodity. In which case, you're out of a job — or ought to be. The road map analogy is a bad one because most sales processes are more like Mapquest directions — they get you to one place, which may or may not be where the customer wants to go.Point 3 - If salespeople waited until prospects were ready, they would be in competitive situations always - "I know what I want, now I just have to decide who to buy from." While they may know what they want, without a salesperson to ask the right questions, they may not know what they need!
Response: There are many ways to avoid becoming involved in competitive bidding. One is to establish a unique market position. Another is to build a strategic relationship with the customer that allows you to act as the consultant who frames the discussion. A rigid sales process tends to make either approach difficult to execute, because a focus on process often blunts the ability to use intuition and perception to understand what's actually going on in the account. Beyond this, the assumption that customers don't know what they need is profoundly disrespectful and off-putting. Customers are smarter about their business than you are. They know what they want to accomplish, even if they sometimes need help to figure out to accomplish it.Point 4 - While some prospects will simply say "yes" at closing time, most won't, even when they're ready. They need to be closed. Effective salespeople help prospects make decisions to buy what they need. Left to their own devices, prospects often fail to act at all.
Response: There's a big difference between thinking of closing as something that you "do" to a customer as opposed to a way to help a customer make a final decision. Kurlan's notion of closing almost always results in manipulative trick closes, which are ineffective, disrespectful and ultimately damaging to the long-term customer relationship.Point 5 - While the economy won't come to a standstill, if everyone in sales moved to the customer centric model, there would be an awful lot of expensive, complex, custom-built products and services that would be sitting on shelves, with salespeople no longer able to demonstrate their value.
Response: The clear assumption in this paragraph, and indeed in Kurlan's entire sales philosophy, is that salespeople have to demonstrate their value by selling customers stuff that customers are too stupid to know that they want. This is exactly the kind of attitude that makes customers think sales pros are obnoxious and arrogant.
As a general remark, Kurlan's apparent inability to understand how the sales profession is changing simply reflects the premise of his book, which recycles the tired "business as baseball" metaphor.
While there are aspects of team sports (teamwork, training, coaching, etc.) that are applicable to any business activity (including sales), team sports always assume that you're playing against a competitor who's playing the same game that you're playing, in fundamentally the same way, on a level playing field, with the same, unchanging rules. That's just not true any longer in today's business world.
To be successful in a global, wired economy, you need to figure out the rules that the customer is using and then figure out how to use them to your advantage. I realize that this terrifies the old guard, who can't stand the idea of giving up the illusion that they're in control of the sale. But that's just how it is, and sales folk who can't adapt, and cling to the old hard-sell tactics, will find their sales fall limp and finally dwindle down to non-existence.
