The Shiny Object

So I’m in the Admiral's Club on Friday evening at SFO after a long week at Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s annual user conference. In his opening address, Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com, mentioned that some 19,000 people were attending Dreamforce this year…and the lines for coffee and restrooms fully supported that claim.

Dreamforce is an interesting dichotomy of people, process and technology. The people range from senior sales executives to junior IT managers, marketing people, finance and operations – anyone with an interest in running salesforce.com applications in their organization. The processes covered during the event span sales, marketing, customer support, development and many others. The technology coverage is similarly broad.

From my perspective, Dreamforce does the sales profession a disservice with its laserlike focus on technology to the near-exclusion of consideration of business needs and process improvement. In his opening remarks, Marc rolled out a new set of features soon to be available (maybe) in the salesforce.com environment, features that add “Facebook and Twitter-like” utilities to the SFA environment.

Why? Because they can. Because the company has been in love with consumer-type apps and Facebook in particular over the past few years. Because it’s cool. Because Marc wants to be notified anytime an opportunity is updated.

Salesforce Blather

This new set of features may be launched in the spring (or maybe not, depending on some unidentified factors), called Salesforce Bla ^h^h^hChatter. Just what I want – my people spending more time typing and networking with one another rather than engaging with prospects and customers.

I’m not taking a potshot at the company…I’m a firm believer in the salesforce apps and the value that they provide to sales organizations. I’m also a firm believer in process before technology, and I’m at a near total loss to understand the value to salesforce.com’s primary users (sales people and their managers) of this new functionality.

They’re Not Alone

In the Expo Hall at Dreamforce, I was heartened to see many new exciting applications that advance the science of selling. Many of these applications quantify and present the results of selling and marketing activities, allowing for substantially better understanding of the performance of the organization. Yet in the Expo Hall, these offerings were arranged in a bazaar-type format, with little rhyme or reason to their placement. Attendees wandered the aisles browsing from one booth to the next, listening to the pitches of each, without building any context of how they might work together, or the relative importance of the problems to be solved.

Without context of the overall organization, these offerings seem like so many more shiny objects to be collected in one’s basket and taken home. In too many sales organizations, technology is selected in the absence of underlying process. Many select the apps without having laid the groundwork of good process and as a result, the technology merely automates chaos.

As we approach 2010, the sales organizations that invest in better processes – focusing on sales force specialization and performance, better interaction between marketing and sales, and increasing investments in customer intelligence – will be rewarded with higher growth rates than their peers.

The market has been ruthless over the past year, culling the weak from the market. It will be no different over the next few quarters and beyond, and those most adaptable to change (ref Charles Darwin) will be rewarded with not only survival but increasing success.

It's People-Process-Strategy

In many conversations with fellow sales executives, marketing executives and others involved in the selling and marketing processes, I found a general awareness of and focus on the triumvirate of people-process-strategy (Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Bossidy). Buy Execution on Amazon

If we work together to solve the problems of sales productivity, we have the opportunity to truly solve our customers' business problems, as opposed to baffling them with irrelevant talk of features, specifications and plumbing.

Thanks,

Lee

Selling is Dead

A good friend of mine, a senior sales executive at an enterprise software company, questions the need for field sales people. And he’s right, the outdated activities carried on by many field reps no longer have a place in this new economic environment.

The selling function has gone bipolar, but not in the sense first conjured by that word. What we’ve seen over the past few years is that the interactions that assist a prospect in completing a transaction have polarized in one of two camps – value or convenience. High touch or high efficiency. Human or automated. Face to face or the web. In person or in pajamas.

When was the last time you went to a bookstore? If you know what book you want, it takes fewer than 50 keystrokes and perhaps 2 minutes of your time to summon the book to your doorstep or inbox. On the other hand, if you want assistance in selecting a new bicycle, you’ll invest a couple of hours at your local bike shop talking with an expert about the relative merits of carbon fiber versus titanium, Campy versus Shimano, DuraAce versus Ultegra or Record versus Chorus.

You’ll still do your homework on the web prior to venturing out to your LBS. You need to show up prepared, to look smart, to avoid being bamboozled by a fast talking sales rep pushing a spiffed product on Saturday afternoon. But once you get there, you will find a rep that you like, someone you’ve decided that you trust (using the elaborate methodology outlined by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink) and you’ll count on her to guide you through the decision making and implementation (fitting) process.

Even smart, well-informed buyers can benefit from experienced, value-adding salespeople. As a cyclist with 35 years and countless thousands of miles under my belt, I once took a vintage cyclocross frame to a local shop (Hot Tubes) to be repainted. When I asked Toby, the shop owner and builder, about painting alternatives, he pointed out that the frame was two sizes too large for me. I had mistakenly assumed that cyclocross frames fit just like road bike frames. The frame went back up on ebay and Toby built me a beautiful custom cyclocross frame, fitting me perfectly and finished in my favorite shade of blue.

As a consumer, I knew what I wanted and I thought I knew what I needed. Toby, as an expert sales person, didn’t go the easy route and accept the frame for painting. Instead, he educated me about proper fit and helped me to conduct a cost benefit analysis of refinishing my (poorly fitting) current frame versus engaging him to build a (properly fitted) new frame.

Buyers selecting sophisticated technology products or services fare no better. Many technology initiatives fail not because of the inadequacies of the product, but of the lack of preparedness of the organization. Buyers think they know what they’re getting into, but simply put, they don’t.

And many sales reps will book the order without helping the organization to understand the processes required to ensure success of the implementation. Most sales people manage to get away with this once with a particular organization; a few manage to do it twice. However, it’s the reputation of the vendor rather than the sales person that is tarnished in the process. And today few vendors can afford to book individual sales at the expense of their reputation and standing in the user community.

So What’s a Savvy Vendor to Do?
You must act now. With the economic pressures easing a bit and budgets starting to loosen somewhat, the imperative to change is lessening. In my research on organizational dynamics, I’ve found that it takes a “big bang event” to ensure the success of a strategic cultural change initiative. (It also takes role and behavior clarity, but that’s a separate conversation.)

The Sales Productivity Framework I developed at IDC incorporates five key productivity levers – people, management, methodology, sales enablement and customer intelligence. How would you assess the capabilities of your sales organization for each of those levers? Are you sending your sales people out unprepared or ill-informed? Are you forcing high value sales engagements on customers looking for simple acquisition efficiency?

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, said that only the paranoid survive. In my experience it’s the world class sales organizations who focus most on improvement. In contrast, most of those stuck in the middle of the pack continue to hope that things will get better. We all know that hope is not a strategy, and we further know that if you’re in the middle of the pack, and not moving up, sooner or later (and probably sooner) you’ll find yourself spit out the back.

Don’t Let this Perfectly Good Crisis Go to Waste

When we come out the other end of this recession, we are not going back to what we wistfully have been referring to as “normal.” Sketchy is the new normal. Uncertain is the new normal. Tight budgets is the new normal. Discerning prospects is the new normal. CFO or CEOs signing off on small projects is the new normal.

Your customers will have less patience for game playing, for unprepared sales resources, for timewasters, for uncertain ROI, for projects that don’t deliver on their explicit promises. If your message is not crisp, if your sales teams are not professional and polished and consultative, “below quota” will be the new normal. And nobody wants to live there.

Thanks,

Lee